This article was originally published in 2018. It has been updated to include additional movies. Even if you spent your summers on the couch watching reruns of The Price Is Right with your babysitter Sonia who smelled like sweat and cheese balls stuck in braces instead of going to summer camp, everyone knows what camp feels like, thanks to the tons of summer-camp movies and TV shows (remember Salute Your Shorts ?) that we’ve seen over the years.
With summer almost here — and with a new entry in the genre, Summer Camp , now in theaters — we thought it time we revisit some of those camps. What makes a summer camp movie great has less to do with the experience of applying bug spray and learning to swim in the lake, and more to do with celebrating childhood, rebellion, groups of scrappy outsiders pitted against the more popular, and like-minded people banding together to make something impossible and wonderful happen. (Most of them have first kisses, too, thanks to all those girlfriends at summer camp that the other kids figured were made up.
) Ahead, we rank the most memorable camp movies, from worst to best. 17. Jim Varney’s inept Podunk character Ernest has not aged especially well (and neither has this movie’s depiction of Kamp Kikakee’s founder, Chief St.
Cloud), but the story of this hapless counselor who takes a pack of delinquents under his wing and ends up saving the camp from destruction by an evil industrialist is just the kind of fun that a camp movie is me.
