Because I like to stick to my promises I watched this movie because it was "featured" on the Netflix start page. I promised a while ago that I would at least try anything they put up there. The trailer was actually pretty good but unfortunately, the rest of the film is just annoying, underfunded, and bad.
Directed by McG whose callsign must mean "I'll Mc Go for any project that pays" is in charge of this film and while it started out promising by mixing humor with what appeared to be a funny story about a ragtag group of kids going to summer camp, it just goes on and on and there are multiple reasons why I had to skip large portions of the film eventually.
When the 4 kids are just handling summer camp in their own individual ways the show is actually quite interesting and actually reminded me of a plethora of summer-camp films from the 80's that I quite enjoyed. However, the mood quickly changes as aliens attack the earth and everyone from the camp has already been evacuated except for these 4 and a drunk counselor.
Things get bad because for me personally, I don't generally care for child actors taking on the roles of adult-decision-making heroes. Also, since they are constantly fleeing some sort of alien monster, the dialogue consists almost entirely of arguing with one another and shouting, normally the name of whoever happens to be in danger, over, and over, and over, as loud as they can.
They eventually get their hands on a car and manage to accomplish what the military of course couldn't, because kids know how to drive a classic supercar in just the right way to take down something that a platoon of soldiers with machine guns and a tank couldn't . It's dumb and impractical.
Maybe this film would be ok for very young kids but then again, because of the content and gore, they are likely not going to be allowed to watch it if their parents care about them. However, even they would likely need to turn the volume waaaay down to shield them from the constant high-pitched pre-pubescent screaming and bickering that fills a vast majority of the screen time from about 20 minutes into the film onward.
The special effects are also not terribly special and look really cheap and fake. I suppose this is understandable since the budget was under 20 million dollars and there is a lot of it.
on a scale of "Urgh!" to "Wowsers!" I glady give a rating that I very rarely use and is reserved for only the worst-of-the-worst....
