The intensity of your love for Theater Camp – and you will love it – is likely to depend on the degree to which you are immersed in the chorus line. The Broadway inoculated may, for instance, find themselves with a mouthful of glitter. They can admire the craft no less. Adoration must, however, grow exponentially with increasing involvement. A lowly film critic can but imagine the viewing joy felt by the graduates of actual, real world theatre camps. The in-jokes run riot. That’s no bad thing. Think of Theater Camp as your initiation. By the final note, all outsiders are welcome.
A background in rap and grime music videos, made on the cheap in a late noughties Islington, informs Charlotte Regan’s impressive directorial debut. It’s experience that floods a tale of social hyper realism with emotional intelligence and a street smart awareness that stories can find their true awakening through visual expression. Words alone are only one part of the equation. Certainly, there’s extraordinary lyrical beauty behind Scrapper, which is itself defiantly atypical. Having nailed over two hundred shorts across her teens – before graduating to bigger collaborations with Mumford & Sons, Wretch 32 and Stereophonics – Regan is no newcomer. That doesn’t stop her first feature from feeling outrageously assured.
It’s the vulgarity of Seth MacFarlane’s bromantic comedy Ted that comes to mind when watching Strays. That, rather than more obvious overlaps with the more wholesome likes of Homeward Bound and The Incredible Journey. Both by Disney. Certainly, a wilfully – gleefully, even – unnecessary blitzkrieg of F-bombs within the opening ten minutes puts pay to any notion that the film might offer up family friendly canine fun. The wilderness of penis, poo and pee-ff gags that follow merely do to hammer home the point. Strays puts the ‘R’ in grrrr. Disney it is not.
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