Sonic Cinema

Grade : B+ Year : 2021 Director : Ivo Raza Running Time : 1hr 31min Genre : Comedy

I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting from Ivo Raza’s cult comedy, but it was definitely an enjoyable bit of silliness, especially while watching it for review in between the heaviness of the offerings of a film festival. When I say “cult comedy” in regards to “Reboot Camp,” I’m not referring to a comedy film that has achieved “cult” status with a fanbase; “Reboot Camp” looks at the evolution of a cult for the purpose of laughs. In reality, there’s nothing funny about cults, but the way Raza has constructed his film allows for comedy to erupt, and it’s a surprising watch.

Seymour (David Lipper) is a filmmaker. He also has had his wife leave him because of her involvement with a cult, which not only cost Seymour his marriage, but thousands of dollars. As a way of trying to understand how this could happen, Seymour and his brother Danny (Keli Price) come up with a scheme: using their filmmaking skills, they will create a fake cult, doing research in how they operate, and lure people in while documenting the entire thing. They find a backing producer (Eddie McClintock), and it starts to go well; they find people who are willing to follow Gordon St. Pierre (who is just Seymour with an accent), and it’s popular. But what happens if they are too convincing at creating St. Pierre into a cult figure?

I’d be curious to see how much of Raza’s screenplay was written prior to the NXIVM controversy, because while there’s certainly different self-help gurus and such that fit the bill, there’s a lot of the language in the way Gordon speaks, not to mention a well-known actress (Claire, played by Maya Stojan) who will become one of the major influencers about the cult, which is akin to Allison Mack and NXIVM. There’s plenty to comedy to be mined in a premise like this, however, as we get well-known people like Ja Rule and David Koechner and Eric Roberts and his wife essentially playing themselves, while other actors play the followers we get to know more. The film operates on the same creative level of the Christopher Guest movies, and in fact, Raza has a similar structure as those movies for “Reboot Camp.” That’s actually the best way to approach this subject, because it justifies Seymour and Danny being the main figure heads in the story, and being able to tell why they did this to begin with, and how it impacts them when it goes sideways. If you’re a fan of “Waiting for Guffman” or “Best in Show” or movies like this, “Reboot Camp” is a successful variation on that premise.