Four college friends are heading into the nearby woods for some rest and relaxation. But before you can say “Deliverance”, our new friends run afoul of some of the locals who don’t take to kindly to any newcomers in their woods, even if they happen to possibly have a “purty mouth”. Paths will cross, cultures will clash and blood will be shed, but not until bellies rumble, because this weekend my friends, it’s going to be a cannibal cookout!

Schlock master John McBride is back with another VHS shot horror flick this time called Cannibal Campout. Sure it’s cheap, campy, crude and less than perfect, but it’s also bloody, entertaining and charming even with all it’s blatant faults. So grab a plate, cut yourself off a hunk of meat, then sit down and enjoy.

The story is nothing new, even for 1988, bunch of good hearted kids head up to the woods for a weekend of fun, hell they even sing a catchy little song on the way up and I can’t tell you the last time I saw four college kids singing a camping song. Anyway once these kids go from the paved road to the dirt road, they immediately meet a bunch of rednecks who don’t take to kindly to strangers and before you know it their asses are grass. So then for the next fifty minutes or so you get to place bets on who is going to make it out alive.

Yes the acting is horrible. Yes, the story lines are bad. Yes, the dialog is atrocious. Yes the production values are non existent. And, finally, yes one of the villains runs around in a flight suit and pilot mask. But and it’s a big BUT, this flick does not suck balls as bad as you would think. There is actually quite a lot of fun to be had with this one.

First there is some fairly decent blood and gore in Cannibal Campout, it’s not going to win any awards for state of the art effects, but everything works fairly well and there was more than one death scene where I was fairly impressed with what the film makers were able to do with almost no budget. Second as much as the characters are annoying idiots, you kind of end up liking some of them, even the bad guys grow on you by the film’s end. And the action, laws yes, did I forget to mention the action? Cannibal Campout has one of the greatest axe vs sledgehammer showdowns ever to be filmed! Sure it’s not supposed to be funny, but I had to watch it three times before the tears of laughter finally left my eyes.

If you like really campy flicks, with cannibals that speak with a Jersey accent and'll eat the unborn right out of a pregnant women’s womb, then Cannibal Campout is the movie for you. But, if you can’t take movies that look like they are made by a bunch of friends with nothing better to do on a weekend, which is what this film really is, then this one is probably not for you.

In the end however, I kinda of liked this one, for pretty much being itself and giving you exactly what you think it would give you in the end, and I also think it even manages to throw in a little surprise in from time to time.

Cannibal Campout is amateur guerilla filmmaking at it’s best and it just goes to show you that a pure love of horror movies and a VHS camcorder is really all you need to get into movie making for yourself. Good job guys, Prime give you a ……

6 of 10.