The classless practice of traumatic profiteering is alive and well in Thomas Walton’s micro-budget slasher Camp Pleasant Lake. We’ve become a society obsessed with gnarly true crime documentaries and podcasts, lifting infamous serial killers to celebrity status. As superfans once wrote letters to Charles Manson in prison, studios now churn out streaming programs about despicable icons like Bundy and Dahmer to capitalize on trending viewership. Camp Pleasant Lake is an intriguing commentary on selling someone else’s grief and loss for your next payday, but at no point does Walton’s execution do his “Horror LARPing” concept justice.

The film takes place at Camp Echo Lake, where new owners Rick (Michael Paré) and Darlene Rutherford (Maritza Brikisak) have reopened as an immersive Halloween experience. For $10,000, attendees are treated to “Camp of Terror,” an all-inclusive murder party that ties back to a horrible crime committed on the grounds 20 years prior. Poor Echo Meadows (Lacey Burdine as Young Echo) attended Halloween camp at “Camp Pleasant Lake” with her brother Jasper (William Delesk as Young Jasper) and went missing; a cult-like family brutally murdered her parents, leaving Jasper’s whereabouts unknown. Rick and Darlene promise their patrons that death will plague the camp once more, delivered by a special effects guru who will “kill” counselors at random during the event. Too bad a real killer has joined the party, and the horror-themed getaway is no longer a safe space.

Again, I’m here for the concept. As a horror lover and former New Jersey resident, I was tempted to spend a few hundred bucks on Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco’s VIP “Crystal Lake Tours” program. We horror fans also love debating how they’d fare in their favorite horror films, which Camp Pleasant Lake attempts to test. The thing is, horror movies aren’t real — that’s what separates Night of the Living Dead from afternoon newscasts. The idea that someone else’s traumas can become popcorn entertainment for the world weighs heavy in the film’s background, because there’s a difference between watching made-up slasher flicks for pleasure versus the giddiness that projects from Camp Echo Lake guests when hearing about poor Echo’s legendary disappearance. Walton’s screenplay builds upon a winning premise, but ends with a frustrating thud.

Unfortunately, Camp Pleasant Lake only deals in generalities and stereotypes. Take the horror blogger Jonah Perrigo (Greg Tally), who waves his HandleWithScare.com press badge around like it’s a key to New York City and keeps demanding an exclusive interview until the joke has no appeal. Rick and Darlene never elevate themselves above the status of iconically terrible business owners, foolish with intent, but underwritten to the point of losing the message. Guests are nameless horror-nerd clones who are devoid of personality beyond chanting “we want blood” as an act of protest, the same as counselors with poorly drawn connections to Echo’s abduction. There’s nothing genuinely meditative or introspectively aware the deeper we get into Walton’s storytelling, unable to turn your run-of-the-mill campfire slasher into a massacre we’ll remember.

Worse still, the film’s slasher elements might be squirting red juices like sprinklers full of Kool-Aid, but the working mechanics that keep the killer slicing and dicing are a mess. There’s nothing exceptional about Camp Pleasant Lake despite dialogue that tries to cheekily serve up “epic” sequences of violence — a garden-variety masked and hooded murderer stabs victims with sharp objects who drop to the floor immediately dead. The premise requires insta-kill dynamics because any giveaway that counselors are dying would send guests fleeing, but the unrealistic presentation of these slaughter scenes comes off as obscenely goofy. Characters stand in a line begging for their “turn,” skewered and slashed, while the rest cheer the display’s (minimal) gore, which plays as disappointingly as that sounds.

The final dagger? Overall quality. Everything feels distractingly staged, like how Walton and David M. Parks always face characters towards the camera, sitting Echo’s family at dinner like the Last Supper, or arranging twenty counselors in a row, screaming one end to the other, behaving like aliens trying to imitate human interactions. Veteran genre actors like Mr. Paré or the Conjurverse’s Bonnie Aarons are lost amidst a cast that has trouble organically delivering a single line, let alone trade banter over campfire beers. Jonathan Lipnicki hammily overplays the film’s worst-kept secret, flashbacks can become undefined in the film’s continuity, and special effects — especially an RV-on-fire sequence — aren’t up to snuff. Usages of “This Little Light of Mine” or the killer’s distorted “happy face” mask are meant to be creepy, but much like the film’s recurring issues, they’re muted and washed away by low-level cinematic merits.

Camp Pleasant Lake wants to match something tenfold more successful, like The Funhouse Massacre or Hell Fest, which it never does. Walton’s commentaries about exploiting real-life tragedies are but seedlings without the proper nourishment to grow. No performer steals the show, nor does the production stash any tricks up its sleeve. Camp Pleasant Lake is in the tradition of cheap-o, sleaze-o midnight flicks that get by on their juicy death scenes, but even those underwhelm. Frankly, everything underwhelms. Characters are cardboard cutouts, there are no surprises, and Walton shows zero control over an obvious whodunit that’s as bland as cafeteria food starving sleepaway campers wouldn’t even tolerate.