Piece of crap. Waste of time. Go do something with your life instead of watching this. I will never get back the hour and a half I wasted on this. Stupidest documentary. Why? I love the real world. If these people took the real world this seriously we'd be better off. Don't watch. These people are a waste of space on earth. This should make you angry because these people are ridiculous. Our society is teaching that this should be normal. Really?? I don't want to live in a world that says this is OK. Go hike, or walk, or swim outside. Take in the real world because this is not the real world. This is not OK and this should never be OK. And from experience, don't let your friends talk you into watching this piece of crap.

This was a fun documentary that shows a group of people playing a live action role playing experience (LARP for short). It is like Dungeons and Dragons acted out with real people playing each characters. Some people are the adventurers trying to get through the story, and some people play the monsters they have to fight and kill to move forward. It's called Monster Camp because that is like the base of operations where the people who are putting it on work out of. The owner of the camp comes across as being very stressed by the responsibilities of running the game, and actually ends up selling the company (NERO). Apparently, it is a lot of work coordinating everything for the three or four days that the customers stay to play. It was hard to understand exactly how the game works, or what the story is behind it (I never was sure what the players were trying to accomplish), but they do explain that characters get killed in battle when they get hit by weapons a certain number of times. Whenever one player hits another with their foam weapon, they call out a number, which is the amount of damage they can do. When a player gets hit enough times to equal the number set on their character, they die, although they can be resurrected back into the game. The movie lets you get to know a little bit about some of the players and some of the people putting the camp on. It was an interesting look into an experience I would probably never otherwise have seen. It would be interesting to see a follow up documentary on the camp. I would even watch another movie about a different group, in hopes that it would be as well made and interesting as this one.

MONSTER CAMP is an honest (if totally detached) attempt to document "the mechanics of making magic happen in the real world." We all live in our own little world(s); some are vacuums. As akin to the nerdlies on THE BIG BANG THEORY as the "outdoorsmen" of The Society For Creative Anachronism, the players in MONSTER CAMP have a flair for fantasy (if I'm not mistaken, I saw several volumes by Terry Brooks on one bookshelf, and I'm sure there must've been some Roger Zelazny somewhere on the premises). Nothing wrong with that. For a decade or so, I headed up a writing group that met one night a week at a local bookstore cum coffee shop. One of three "group novels" we tried to write was a fantasy that featured trolls and shapeshifters and druids. Unfortunately, we weren't all on the same page, so to speak, and the book was never finished. But I may one day finish my own version. There's a lot to be said for finding people of a like mind to pal around with. Hereabouts, they're rare to the point of nonexistence. Fortunately for the gamers in MONSTER CAMP, they can network. More power to them.

Director Cullen Hoback dives into the world of live-action roleplaying.In Seattle, a group of young men and women gather every year to live out their fantasy-based fantasies. They dress up as warriors and monsters and re-enact battles based on World of Warcraft.The group, known as NERO (New England Roleplaying Organization), follows the rules outlined in their 184-page rulebook. Throwing packets of birdseed (which they use as spells to cast) and hitting one another with padded swords, the players spend 48 consecutive hours as their characters.Hoback's film does a wonderful job of being informative about the NERO culture, while at the same time, telling the stories of quite a large amount of participants.An important note: the film does not make fun of these people. While it might have been easy to make a film at their expense, Hoback does not do this. The themes of this film are companionship, escapism, and most importantly, imagination.Monster Camp is extremely entertaining. If you get a chance to watch it, do yourself the favor and get some friends together one night and check it out.