Heaven's for Everybody. 'Cept you!: Bloody Bloody Bible Camp (2012)

Bloody Bloody Bible Camp (2012)
rating: ***
starring:  Reggie Bannister, Tim Sullivan and Ron Jeremy

Now, I waited for this. Cringed, begged and flailed for the unknown forces in the universe to have this movie reach me in anyway possible since I've first heard of the movie at 2008. Now, I finally had it, and I got around the wildest, sleaziest and moderately gory retro throwback to the 70s/80s hack n' slash years.

Starting with 1977,  campers and counselors of a Christian camp in the woods spends one night with booze, drugs and the occasional sex fest. (Not entirely the thing you would be expecting from a camp of this nature, but let's think outside the box here for a second!) Some went on to score some girls, others drank more booze, smoke a roll or just go to sleep; unknown to them, someone in a nun's habit had just believed it's about time to have these people a one on one talk with the Almighty for their sins, so after fifteen minutes into the movie, and during the title credits (the same gimmick used in the Friday the 13th reboot) we got our first massacre done through a rather cheap looking yet deadly crucifix dagger.

Seven years later, another set of colorful teens (yeah, no, not really) joins Father Cummins in his mission to hopefully reopen the Bible camp. Despite the locals warning of them not to enter "Bloody Bloody Bible Camp", the group went on and did the very same things most backwoods slasher victims does before they get gutted alive: campfire tale, then random filler, swim in the lake, more random filler, and death of the first victim. Which happens to be African American. (There goes me trying to debunk the "Black Guy dies first" as no more than a myth...) A town legend known as Sister Mary Chopper had returned, a madman transvestite who's mentally abused as a child by a nun (of course) and rumored to had grown up as a devil masked, cross-dressing nun with an axe, who's main mission is to kill of all fornicators, meaning one thing for the campers and counselor: they're f*cked.

Bloody Bloody Bible Camp definitely works on mysterious ways; while it hails some crafty tributes to some 80s slasher classics (naked lady running down the stairs from The Demon (1980), eye popped out ala 3D from Friday the 13th part 3, just to name a few), BBBC also molded something of a bad taste charm for itself while not altogether parodying the slasher subgenre itself. It's clearly a movie made for laughs, overriding it with exaggerated cliches and stereotypes, and even going as far as letting all sense of dread gone around the end for a totally messed-up and random finale.

Only the dividing taste of the viewer will tell whether this is a good or a bad thing; I clearly find myself wedge in the middle of two conflicts here. I find the concept, the killer and some of the bloody good kills to be, well, bloody good; although the ever-running campiness of the flick, bullocks load of plot holes, the lack of any rootable characters and the out-of-the-blue finale got me tilting my head again asking myself if that was the whole movie itself?

It's nice to see Reggie Bannister again, I'll give my hat to that; while it's virtually impossible now to have that Fourth Phantasm movie, which means it's bye-bye to ice cream man-turned-"soldier" Reggie, I'm just glad to see the guy in relatively small roles such as this. Then there's also Ron Jeremy as Jesus Christ (!); not much to comment out of that one actually, his role in this is more of a random encounter siding with comic relief. Rest are pretty unknown, least for me, with varying level of presentation on their roles.

There's also a truck-load of gore presentable in the movie. Nasty, messy, splashy gore. Some realistic, other's a little cheap, all gruesomely good to go with our maniac nun, a cleverly sweet variation to the killer preacher troping that's rarely tackled in this subgenre.

Retro fans might see a good spending with this flickie, though I'm more leaning to just recommending a weekend rent for those in doubt. True, it's a little cheap, lacking some strong backbone and solid casting, but if you like sleaze, exploits too silly to offend, and backwoods gore, then Bloody Bloody Bible Camp is your destination!

Bodycount:
1 male crucifix dagger through the head, exit to eye
1 male crucifix dagger to the neck
1 male strangled with rosary
1 male disemboweled with crucifix dagger
1 male stabbed to death crucifix dagger
1 female found decapitated
1 male castrated with crucifix dagger
1 female had crucifix dagger thrown to her head
1 male decapitated with axe
1 male gut slashed open with axe
1 male head crushed with cinder block
1 female axe swung to her groin
1 male stabbed to death with crucifix dagger
1 male crucifix dagger to the neck
1 male crushed underneath a corpse
total: 15