Campfire Tales (1997) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Campfire Tales is, well, pretty much exactly what it sounds like, an anthology of horror stories told around a campfire. There is a "hook" to the campfire scenes as well, but they exist mainly to provide a framing structure for the four urban legends. You know the drill - they are the kind of stories that end with a listener declaring "c'mon, that isn't true!" The storyteller then draws from the box of stock responses, which usually produces a result something like "Oh, I know the story is true, because the man with the missing finger ... was ME!!!" (Jumps suddenly at listener, followed by diabolical laughter.)

It isn't a bad film, but it is just as run-of-the-mill as it sounds. It just doesn't have much juice. The four stories are light on gore, light on T&A, and heavy on standard horror clichés. I can give you only one good reason to watch the film: you get a chance to see several young actors who later became much more successful. There's Ron Livingstone, who later starred in the cult classic comedy, Office Space. There's James Marsden, who become Cyclops in the X-Men movies. There's Jacinda Barrett, who debuted in Campfire Tales, and graduated to small but important parts in A-List movies like The Human Stain and Bridget Jones 2. There's Christine Taylor, who married Ben Stiller and co-starred with him in Dodgeball. There's Chris Masterson from Malcolm in the Middle, and adorable Amy Smart, who never became a star, but has always had a steady paycheck. If you watch Campfire Tales you can see all of them when they were much younger and not at all famous, and that's actually kind of cool.

Although the film featured so many rising stars, the female nudity was provided by a falling star, or maybe it's more appropriate to call her a disappearing star, Jennifer MacDonald, who worked steadily in the 1994-1996 era, but seems to have closed out her movie and TV career with this film. Although she has some fans and there is even a web site dedicated to her worship, nobody seems to know what she's doing now. If her biography can be believed, she is a person with unusual and wide-ranging interests (she learned to speak standard Arabic and Egyptian in military intelligence), so I suppose she has probably found a profession which gives her more intellectual satisfaction.