CAMP NOWWHERE
US, 1994, 96 minutes, Colour.
Christopher Lloyd, Jonathan Jackson, John Putch, Peter Scolari, Romy Windsor, Joshua G. Maywether, Andrew Keegan, M. Emmett Walsh, Ray Baker, Kate Mulgrew,
Directed by Jonathan Prince.
Camp Nowhere is a family film from the middle of the 1990s. It draws on the popularity of children going on summer camps.
Jonathan Jackson plays Mud, small but strong minded, allegedly bullied but actually doing assignments for Zach, bigger and taller, not a student but good at fixing machines. He and two girls are close friends – and all going to summer school according to their ambitious parents. Mud’s parents want him to go to computer school. Zach’s father is very military. One of the girls has to train in acting while the other has to consider her diet. The parents are concerned – but a touch caricatured.
They encounter an eccentric man, Christopher Lloyd doing all kinds of comic turns, and persuade him with threat of exposure as a conman not paying his debts, to be the front man for their own camp. He impersonates the different interests for the parents benefit and gets their consent.
Meanwhile, other friends hear about it as do quite a number of the boys and girls at school and all want to join. They go to a rather rundown place under the flight path from a military installation, interviewing veteran Burgess Meredith.
They set up camp as young adolescents would, exercising freedom, eating all the wrong kinds of foods, involved in all kinds of activity and play. The have to write a letter home each month to prove they are at camp.
Meanwhile, Mud has to go to the doctor, and poses as Lloyd’s son. Lloyd is immediately attracted to the doctor, Wendy Mackenna. Eventually, she will find out the truth.
In the meantime, the parents decide that they want to visit’s even though Parents’ Day is forbidden. This requires an enormous amount of logistics, seemingly impossible, for each of the four main children present to persuade their parents, with the help of all the other children, that they are at their particular camp. Zach’s father is trapped in a foxhole four hours. Mud pretends that he has access to American government sites. One of the girls is the star of the production of Annie. The other has slimmed down.
In the meantime, there have been some tangles with the local police. And the creditor, M. Emmett Walsh joins him in searching for Lloyd.
The parents enjoy the success of their children and don’t press charges. Mud is persuaded to spend some time out in the woods so that his parents would be so glad to get him back that they won’t press charges either. Mud pays off the creditor and Lloyd and the doctor go off happily together.
Enjoyable for children and their rebel spirit. Some criticism of obsessive parents and imposing parents, but all happy in the end.
