Campfire Stories (2001)

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Two unfortunate college males, heading for a shin-dig with girls, flatten their tire when coming close to hitting a hitcher(Jamie-Lynn Sigler of "Sopranos" fame)on some highway surrounded by woods. She leads them into the woods "to find help" and they meet a forest-ranger named Bill(David Johansen)around a camp fire who tells them "scary" stories supposedly teaching them lessons about life.The first is about what occurs to some idiot, scumbag jocks who mess around with a school janitor who just happens to be an escaped convict who was able to flee his asylum by murdering the psychotic doctor performing "pain threshold experiments" on him. They get in over their heads when the boys "chase" him into the woods and truly realize just who their up against.Three criminals, leather-jacket punks, and their equally repellent chick that hangs with them, attack and rob a powerful motorcycle-riding(!) Indian with a magic bag. They start smoking his stash of wacky weed and suffer horrifying hallucinations which will effect them physically as it does mentally.Two young couples stay at a country-house for the night for a little game of "truth and dare", drinking, and sex while a killer begins to pick them off one by one while filming the action on video camera.Poorly produced, gore-less, and about as scary as a Sesame Street episode. The violence almost completely takes place off-screen and it is apparently(because the whole film seems shot on someone's camcorder)because of a zero budget. Each story within the film is yawn-inducing instead of gripping and the entire cast elicit little sympathy from the viewer. The second story has horrendous computer effects during the hallucination sequences. David Johansen as the story-teller Ranger Bill is laughable. Jamie-Lynn Sigler as Natalie the hitch-hiker barely registers.

I'd like to start off as saying that I, like so many horror film buffs, enjoy the cheap laughs to be acquired from B-grade trash. The film "Campfire Stories," however, isn't even amusing accidentally. I'd love to know how badly Jamie-Lynn DiScala, David Johansen, and the Misfits needed money to partake in this utter waste of celluloid.I knew this one was going to be trouble when I saw a talking skull engulfed in flames at the beginning. From there on in, we have two annoying young men who can't tell a joke correctly get lost in the woods with a beautiful "Sopranos" girl, where they come across Ranger Bill, Buster Poindexter's evil alter-ego. He proceeds to bore them to death with three generic horror tales with relentlessly inane twists at the end of each.The first tale is of a nameless lunatic who escapes the Corbin Bernsen Institute of Dentistry, reestablishes himself as a Catholic high school janitor, and takes out four of the young men they randomly pulled off the street to play the most annoying bullies I've ever seen. The second tale involves three career criminals who rob a Native American spiritualist, smoke his peace pipe (which was obviously filled with whatever the filmmakers were smoking), and are tormented by legions of computer animations created by first-year graphic arts majors from a community college. The third tale involves a homicidal maniac whose identity you'll probably figure out long before it's "revealed."After sitting through these three sessions of ungodly torment, we're finally punished with a "surprise ending" which tries to tie everything together but fails miserably along with everything preceding it. "Campfire Stories" has no scares, no humor, and over all, no redeeming value whatsoever. If you want a real scare, light up a campfire and tell your own stories; they'll be a hundred times scarier than this melted marshmallow.

There were 2 American tragedies in 2001: the first being 9/11 the other being the release of this film. A harbinger of this film was while renting it, the women at the register couldn't get the security seal off. Buster Poindexter, I mean David Johansen, is the story teller of these three tales from the crypt, sorry , tales from the crap. I'll go as far as saying it's the best, no, only, anamorphic widescreen film ever made! There are many life lessons learned in this film however: 1. Don't ever get high off a Indian's bong, especially after you just killed him and are using his trailer. 2. Don't pretend to have a "broken" arm when its clear your "acting" and if your going to enlist the help of your friends to kill a mentally retarded handyman, don't have your weapons of choice be a croquet mallet, lacrosse stick, and a hockey stick. Your going to go kill a man, not the country club. Also, make sure they clear time in their schedule so they don't have to squeeze this in before their orthodontists appointment/ band practice. 3. Don't fake a lesbian kiss.4. Don't pick up people a mile away from their car and you never saw one. They are probably lying. Other than that, I found this movie quite enjoyable. Honest to God, I liked it more then Schindler's List, Titanic, and Saving Private Ryan combined. Those films ain't got sh*t on Campire "motherfu****'" Stories!

This is a totally inept movie. I cannot believe that it was released. It is eerie in its own horrible way. The girl is who plays the lead character is very cute - but where´s the horror? Where´s the humour? This is such an insult both to the genre and to any decent viewer.