Marshall and the Movies

Fantastic Fest, 2015

The danger of seeing successive films at a festival is that their cumulative effect can prove quite draining, making the later films in the day enervate rather than energize. “Camino” is one such film that fell victim to the festival effect for me, but let me be clear – I do not think the fault is entirely my own.

I drifted in and out of sleep for large portions of Josh C. Waller’s film, yet every time I opened my eyes, I could figure out exactly what I had missed. The script is just that simple. “Camino” marks another uninspired entry into the canon of “Final Girl” movies, where a lone female survivor outlasts everyone else in the film for some intrinsic virtue. Zoë Bell’s protagonist, war photographer Avery Taggert, lacks any kind of exceptional gumption that merits our investment of energy or empathy.

The film follows Taggert on assignment in Colombia, where she ultimately must flee and fight for her life after capturing a rather damning incident on camera. Her journey for survival, riddled with cliches and void of tension, is the kind of thing I would gladly sleep through in any kind of viewing environment. Waller makes an unabashed B-movie with “Camino,” but who really cares when that film is made from a C-grade screenplay? C /