The Simple Life Season 5 (Goes To Camp) DVD Review

January 14, 2008

The Simple Life Goes to Camp is the fifth season of the television show featuring celebutantes Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie as they give up their fast-paced Hollywood lifestyle to live like every other Tom, Dick and Harry in the “Real World.” The season starts off with the duo reenacting their reunion after the over publicized feud that haunted every grocery shopper in America for two years. After rejoining forces, the pair ship off to a sleep-away camp. Paris and Nicole become Camp Counselors at a summer camp facility that throughout the summer is the location for several very specific types of camps. Paris and Nicole work as different groups of people come and go, including a weight loss camp, a couples relationship retreat, and a group of mothers and daughters who engage in pageants.

True to form, seen in the other seasons, the two mischievous girls get into trouble in a variety of ways. They manage to bungle every task assigned to them, as they cut corners to get out of their duties. The girls help administer enemas to the attendees of the weight control camp, they teach pageant girls how to use their middle fingers to flip people off, and demonstrate male and female erogenous zones by drawing them onto a unitard clad camp counselor’s body. The outlandish antics do not stop there. Paris takes it upon herself to teach the 11 year-old son of camp director Ed Bellante the art of dating by setting him up with a 6 year-old attendee of pageant camp. In a similar vein, the duo take the female attendees of a weight loss camp to a convenience store and purchase junk food.

The Simple Life Goes to Camp is grossly inappropriate for anyone of any age. It is sad that the state of television is such that this kind of trash is what passes as entertainment. These two vapid, empty-headed girls are so painfully self-absorbed that watching the show is like rubbing sandpaper over your own face. Whenever the girls are assigned to a task, they manage to screw it up, laughing all the way. There is only one thing even remotely redeemable about anything that either Paris or Nicole does on the show. During the pageant camp stay, Paris and Nicole take it upon themselves to bring fun into the lives of the poor young girls, who are tormented by their over-bearing stage mothers.

Everything on the show is obviously choreographed. What seems like a spur of the moment event when Paris and Nicole decide to break into a refrigerator that had been chained closed by hooking it up to an SUV, is actually miraculously well covered with recorded footage and is even filmed by cameras within the vehicle. There are also allegations that several of the people who appear on the show are actors. For example, the “camp nurse” is actually actress Jamie Sue Sherrill, who has appeared on television shows like ER and The Bold and the Beautiful, as well the Kevin Costner film Dragonfly. The season’s only redeeming quality is that there are only ten episodes, painful as they might be.

The episodes are presented in Full Frame and are in stereo sound. There are no additional special features, although the episodes include French and Spanish subtitle options.

From-http://www.realmovienews.com/dvd/reviews/1852