Monster Camp

This is a documentary about people who LARP (Live Action Role Playing). These are people who don’t find Dungeons & Dragons engaging enough and feel the need to go into the woods, act out scenarios, and fight each other with padded swords until they knock each others' glasses off. Sounds cool, right? If it does, then quit reading here, because I’m about to go off.

These socially crippled (it goes soooo far beyond inept) people live in a fantasy world most of the time and can only associate with other socially crippled people when those people are pretending they’re moronic character portrayed by wearing homemade costumes hobbled together using paperclips, felt, and fake ears. They glue ridiculous eyebrows and noses onto their faces and paint their faces with grease paint to make other attempts to hide their identities in case a person with self-esteem finds them in the woods and begins mocking them openly. These poor attempts at costumes are made even more hilarious by 95% of them wearing giant glasses from the 80’s, and wearing sneakers. These people meet in the woods in various locations, are given character profiles to act out, and are set loose with magic packets filled with birdseed, and potions to supposedly heal/kill/disease/change weather, etc. They hit each other with foam-wrapped swords and yell out “5-magic” and “3-sleep” and other stupid things which mean nothing unless you’ve memorized the 250-page rule book they have created.

Many of the characters normally live in their parent’s basements and their families are interviewed, which makes the participants even more pathetic. One kid brings his nerd father, who frankly, I’m amazed is married. One nerd father brings his mildly attractive underage daughter to the LARP weekends and in real life, pays her an allowance in bullshit fake silver, golf, and copper (I would seriously be pissed about that). Another nerd (who loves to ride his ten speed wearing spandex bike shorts and a leather jacket) brings a girl to the weekend – maybe he can sense they share a common socially-moronic bond or something – and some of the other characters indicates he’s a bit of a player/ladies man – which I ASSURE you, he is NOT. These LARP people make trekkies seem suave and sophisticated and full of dignity.

I yelled at the screen sooooo much during this film. At one point, I felt like Ogre from “revenge of the Nerds” since I was screaming “NERDS!” at the television. My friend Coach and I like to play a little game called “Who Would You Let Live” in which, given the opportunity to throw a grenade into a crowd of people, you get to choose 5 people you would rescue before the grenade went off. All of these LARP people would die - and not in their fantasy world either. Seriously, this movie pissed me off to an infinite degree. Get off your World of Warcraft game, take a shower, go have a conversation with someone of the opposite sex while actually looking them in the eye, and get a job. Welcome to reality, you stupid bastards.