Featured Articles
| Campiest Places of San Francisco Part 1… La Musee Mechanique |
Recent Articles and Reviews
| How the message of a movie can ruin it: Gothika. |
| Baudrillard. 9/11. Hollywood. Cloverfield. |
| Guy Richie. Madonna. Ideological Corruption. Swept Away. |
| Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the long overdue review…M. Knight Shyamalan's The Happening! |
| Queen of the Damned…title of a movie, or exalted status in the pantheon of bad cinema? |
| Totally engrossing… Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. |
| Camp Academy delves into politics, a first, in its unearthing of the following opinion piece by actor Jon Voight. |
| Ketching up on old films… Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. |
| Why I still hate Paranormal State Season 2. |
| Another Roger Corman Classic. Death Race 2000. |
| Shakedown… why do I have so much to say about this movie? |
| Category 7: The End of the World. What's next, Category 9: from Outer Space? |
Thought of the Day
| 8/27/2008 BIG LOTS comes through again! On sale now are their $3.00 DVDs, much like their recent MGM promotion. But this time BIG LOTS has truly outdone themselves. Including in the DVD rack are staples of bad moviedom including the Madonna/Guy Ritchie catastrophe SWEPT AWAY; the auto-destructive Dana Carvey vehicle THE MASTER OF DISGUISE; HOWLING IV: THE ORIGINAL NIGHTMARE; the early Johnny Depp sex romp PRIVATE RESORT; Playboy bunnies as alien nurses in CANDY STRIPERS; and what the Golden Raspberries have declared one of the most enjoyable bad movies ever, SHEENA. And that's not all. I dropped $50.00-> How far will YOU go? |
Camp Academy
If there's at least one thing we'll grant to late capitalism, it's that it has generated more camp than perhaps any other moment in history. Never before have our daily lives been surrounded with the superficial, the confused, the faulty, and the idiosyncratic. In some cases, these instances of camp have found devoted followings, but even these cult movements can't keep up with the sheer quantity of camp just floating about mainstream society like so much space debris.
The purpose of this site is to pick up and examine these pieces of junk with a critical eye, if only for just a moment, before setting them aside and moving on to the next. There is no grand theme here, no narrative, simply an excursion from the marble corridors of high taste into the neon alleyways of pulp, sleeze, and outright failure.
We come armed only with the (perhaps equally campy) language of literary and cultural theory, a loose framework which will at least allow us to organize these myriad sites of camp. Whether or not applying such theoretical discourse to such explicitly untheoretical things proves campy in its own right we will have to see. But if you're interested in joining us, pack your bags and lunchboxes, hop on the schoolbus, and have a seat next to me: because here at Camp Academy, the academy goes to camp!