World Ends at Camp Z Review (2022) Worth Watching?

In a pandemic stricken world, a group staying at a campsite finds themselves fighting more than the disease.

World Ends at Camp Z was directed by Ding Wang and stars Anne-Carolyne Binette (from Butchers), Dean Persons, and Osawa Muskwa.

The first thing that struck me about World Ends at Camp Z is that it was very clearly made during the pandemic; it’s great to see people work with what they have and play on real-life fears that affected everyone on the planet somehow, so I appreciated that.

Julian (Dean Persons) and Clay (Osawa Muskwa) are the owners of a campsite in a tiny town out in the wilds of Quebec; they are forced to sell for financial reasons. Julian is upset at losing his childhood home and Clay, though he knows what must be done, wants to make sure the new owners treat these sacred lands with respect; there are indigenous legends tied up in the area.

Enter Vanessa (Anne-Carolyne Binette), the representative of a prospective buyer, who promises her client wants to keep the land as it is and respect the area; little does she know, he has entirely different plans.

A group of rich kids turns up at the camp, and we follow them as the pandemic amps up, and they find themselves the target of a dangerous hoard.

This will be right up your street if you like an excellent stereotypical ‘teen,’ zombie, campsite horror!
It is refreshing to have an indigenous character as a lead, and essentially the film is very well acted. However, I did find the feeling of Nate (James Chapman) to be guilty of some ridiculously over-the-top acting. 'World ends at camp Z' maybe takes a little too long to get to the point, but it doesn’t feel boring to watch.

The zombies look fantastic. However, I found that they overused the slow-motion technique during the zombie scenes. It got a bit repetitive.

The film's end was somewhat predictable and didn’t leave me with any natural feeling of resolution.
Clay was a very engaging and well-written character in this film and Osawa Muskwa did an excellent job portraying this character. I also enjoyed Vanessa’s character arc and her underlying badass nature.

I found Nate to be irritating and have no redeeming features. In every scene, he’s just a complete jerk; there was no rounding off of him as a person. There’s no reason for him to be there, and I questioned why anyone, let alone an entire group of people, would choose to spend any time with this person; he seems a little lazily written as a character.

I was also a little unclear as to why they incorporated a lot of legends about the camp in the film and then didn’t go anywhere with it.

Even though it is a budget horror, it has some beautiful cinematography showing us some beautiful nature shots of Quebec.

There are some fantastic gory scenes in this film and some good creepy stories.

Overall I enjoyed this film; I felt like I cared what happened to most of the characters, it gave me what I needed from a zombie horror, and it is beautifully shot.