Ginny, Nora and Mary were three outcast kids … a long time ago. But they didn’t fit with the other kids at summer camp way back when. So when they met each other, it was like discovering a marvelous three-piece jigsaw made by the heavens above.
They worked together, laughed together. And even though they were so very different, they became the best of friends. Through thick and thin they were held together by Ginny’s strong and persuasive personality. For years, these girls would endure a boring year just waiting for summer and another exhilarating summer camp together.
Five or six decades later, though, their BFF “exhilaration” has, well, waned.
Mary is now an ER nurse who has a rather unhappy marriage. Nora is a widowed workaholic CEO of a chemical company. And Ginny? Ginny Moon is a Dr. Phil-like famous personality known far and wide for her catchphrase: “Get your sh-t together!”
Ginny is also a force of nature. So when she decides that it’s high time to gather the girls together for a summer camp reunion, it will happen. She spares no expense or effort to rent out Camp Pinnacle and to create a massive reunion for all the many campers from years ago.
And the three besties? Well they get nothing short of a decked-out, three-person cabin, redecorated and stocked by Martha Stewart herself.
Hey, even way-back-when camp crushes Tommy and Stevie D show up, much to Mary and Nora’s delight. Ginny, you see, has plans to not only rekindle the flames of friendship with her girls but maybe to spice up her friend’s lives with a little shoehorned-in-place romance as well.
I mean that’s what a relationship guru does, right?
The three friends have their tug and pull moments. Ultimately, they recommit to their friendship and learn important lessons. Nora reassesses her tendency to overwork; Mary stands up for herself and decides to reach for long-desired goals; Ginny steps back from her tendency to manipulatively control others.
None.
Even though the camp attendees are all older adults, we still hear lots of discussions about sexual activities and desires. We hear quips about breast implants, genitals and the like. (In Ginny’s case, those conversations can get a bit crude.) Nora’s gay assistant talks about his male partner.
And though it’s certainly not intended to be titillating, a flashback scene centers on teen Ginny helping teen Mary with her first menstrual period. (We include anatomical and biological content such as this in Sexual Content section.) Later, a cutscene during the film credits shows young Ginny helping her friend insert a tampon, with the camera looking over young Mary’s shoulder.
[Spoiler Warning] By movie’s end, Mary accepts her friends’ advice and decides to leave her husband.
The thumps and bumps here tend to be the slapstick variety, for the most part. The older women dangle from heights, fall off a raft, flip over a horse’s neck and the like. But most of the pratfalls happen to a couple of younger camp counselors, who fall over tables, get battered to the ground, hit with a barrage of thrown food and stepped on by a horse.
The one bloody encounter features a teen Nora who accidentally shoots a fellow camper with a arrow to the side. We see the bloody spot on his shirt with the arrow protruding from his abdomen. His older version shows us the scar years later.
The dialogue contains two f-words (one used in combination with God’s name) and nearly 20 s-words. There are also more than a dozen uses of “b–ch” and a handful each of the words “a–hole,” “d–n” and “h—.”
God’s and Jesus’ names are misused a total of 10 times.
The adults are all staying at a kids’ camp, but there’s an ample supply of alcohol regularly flowing. The three ladies and a number of other adults are often at least lightly inebriated. (The friends have a stocked wine cabinet in their cabin.)
An underage teen girl smokes a cigarette.
While “counseling” a fellow adult camper Ginny is purposely rather cruel, embarrassing the woman in public.
Imagine a summer-camp movie featuring a bunch of teens guffawing about sex, getting drunk, talking profanely about life and tumbling into hijinks that eventually teach them a little bit about friendship.
Got it?
OK, now imagine all that, only as a camp reunion movie with old people. That’s Summer Camp.
Yes, there are a few amusing (and seemingly ad-libbed) moments in this flick. And we get a couple of nice lessons in the mix about stepping back from too much work and letting go of your desire to control life. From that point of view, we can give Summer Camp modest credit for urging its viewers to appreciate the little things in life we sometimes ignore.
That’s great and all. But those thumbs-up bits are only a tiny portion of the whole film. Sorta like that one afternoon when you enjoyed learning to paddle a canoe during a summer camp otherwise filled with mosquito bites, snoring bunkmates and a poison ivy outbreak.
The rest of this flick is filled with off-color, profane and tipsy misbehavior that feels obnoxious when kids are doing it and really forced when the oldies embrace it.
My recommendation: grab the kids and a canoe, then head to the nearest lake.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
