Summer Camp

If watching Alfre Woodard and Dennis Haysbert make phallic-shaped pottery while dropping PG-13 innuendos sounds like your idea of a good time, Summer Camp may be the movie for you.

Such eye-rolling shenanigans are in line with a film that banks on viewers buying that teenage acquaintances — read: not old flames — Nora (Diane Keaton) and Stevie D (Eugene Levy, oddly sounding like Bryan Cranston), and Mary (Woodard) and Tommy (Haysbert) all happen to be single (or at least willing to mingle) and still romantically interested in each other, 50 years after the last time they were at Camp Pinnacle.

Filmed at the actual Camp Pinnacle in Hendersonville, Summer Camp’s lone appeal is its local production, seeing as writer/director Castille Landon gives her all-star cast barely anything to work with.

However, such lack of guidance seems fine and dandy with these actors — particularly Keaton. On ditzy AARP Annie Hall autopilot mode yet again, complete with sad awkward slapstick antics, her phoned-in performance begs the question why she continues to make movies (unless she simply enjoys playing the same basic role over and over).

The lame reunion plot also pulls in Kathy Bates as Nora’s and Mary’s other best friend, Ginny, now a famous self-help guru. As the longtime pals conveniently realize what makes them truly happy over the course of a few days in Western North Carolina, Landon wrings her cast through some of cinema’s most tired clichés, including a “big fight” where the friends let loose of all the baggage and repressed feelings they’ve been holding on to for years in one big go, and all wrongs being righted through a big climactic speech.

In turn, hardly any of Summer Camp is fun to watch, but almost all of it it was probably fun for the cast and crew to make.

Grade: D-plus. Rated PG-13. Now playing at Carolina Cinemark, Grail Moviehouse, and Regal Biltmore Grande.

(Photo: Roadside Attractions)