Camp Nowhere

Morris Himmel dreads the thought of another summer spent at a camp chosen by his parents. When he and his friends learn that they are all headed for the same dull fate, they decide to take matters into their own hands. Together they invent a camp of their own and convince their parents to send them there. They set up in an abandoned hippie commune, but their scheme needs an adult figurehead, so an out-of-work actor named Dennis Van Welker is recruited to pose as the camp director. The arrangement holds until parents' day approaches, when the deception is at risk of coming apart.

Camp Nowhere was directed by Jonathan Prince, and it is the first of the two features he directed in the 1990s. The screenplay is by Andrew Kurtzman and Eliot Wald, and Michael Peyser produced it for Hollywood Pictures. The cast includes Jonathan Jackson as Morris, Andrew Keegan as Zack Dell, Marnette Patterson as Trish Prescott, Melody Kay as Gaby Nowicki, Christopher Lloyd as Dennis, and M. Emmet Walsh as T.R. Polk, among forty-two credited roles.

Released in August 1994, the film runs ninety-six minutes and mixes comedy with family drama. On IMDb it holds a 6.1 rating from about eleven thousand votes, while on TMDB it stands at 5.9 from a much smaller number of votes. Critics were far harsher, giving it 3.3 out of 10 across twelve reviews.