We all have Pavlovian responses to things, especially when it comes to sex. I get a little hitch in my giddy-up every time I see Jean-Claude Van Damme, even the 2021 version.
And I know that everyone thinks Tony Bullock is an incorrigible horndog who goes through life with a semi, but I swear there are things that don’t get me riled up. I’m hard-pressed to think of one now—uh-oh, “hard.” Hold on.
Anyway. I started thinking about Pavlov and his theory of conditioning—that we can rewire our brains to have automatic responses to stimuli—when I sat down with a container of Vaseline and Say Uncle’s new site Boys at Camp queued up. Because as soon as that vaguely familiar, rough-edged font popped up on my screen, my dick reminded me of lazy Saturday mornings in bed, grinding into the mattress while I watched the Tales From the Crypt cartoon.
I have been told that Tales From the Crypt was not a sexy show for everyone, which I guess makes it a little weird that a porn company would use that immediately recognizable font, but hey! Imagining a desiccated corpse reveling in stories about terrified and terrorized teens works for me. I’m not saying I need horror to cum, but I am saying I didn’t mind that Boys at Camp put that classic series in my head from the get.
So yeah, OK, I have’t even gotten to the actual porn yet and I’m thinking about the Cryptkeeper and I’m hard, so I know this is going to be good, right? And boy, was I… correct! Boys at Camp really goes for a niche within a niche. The lure is Boy Scouts fucking. I mean, obviously. But there’s so much more for those of us hardened—ugh, there we go again!—porn aficionados.
Here are some bold choices that really stood out for me—and got my eager cock standing up!
I love when porn models accidentally make panicked eye contact with the camera, breaking the fourth wall and the illusion that what I’m watching is really happening. Who says Brecht is only for the stage?
One of the things that I’ve found sadly lacking in pornography recently is a level of amateurishness. I don’t mean actual amateurs. I mean the kinds of awkward, stilted scenes that still inspire lazy sitcom writers. So I loved the homage to those ’90s videos where a hot guy struggles to act because let’s face it: These guys shouldn’t have to multi-task unless they’re proven to be adept at it. And these scouts are asked to deliver all kinds of exposition, hilarious non sequiturs, and absurd reasons to get naked. There’s also a great homage in “Better Than a Hike” to the early days of porn, where these filmmakers laboriously make sure that the audio doesn’t match the visual. Like watching a foreign film dubbed into English!
That same level of authenticity extends to the production itself. I always knew this was truly filmed out of doors because the filmmakers cleverly made no attempt to control the sound. Sometimes the models were inaudible; sometimes a breeze whipped across the mics and I got a flash to talking to people while they walked around on a windy day, which made me think of Diane Lane meeting Olivier Martinez in Unbreakable which got my deflating dick rock hard again. Even the camerawork is painstakingly crafted to feel off-the-cuff, with the image sometimes going in and out of focus. As we all know, attention to detail is sexy!
I also really started leaking at the thoroughness of the daily tasks shown in each video. The minutes-long, silent sequences of unfurling a sleeping bag or slowly buttoning up one’s shorts and tying one’s kerchief reminded me of Chantal Ackerman’s nearly four-hour-long 1975 classic Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, where a repetition of meticulous housework lends the proceedings a sense of looming doom. I got that same sense in Boys at Camp, too!
All in all, there’s so much to recommend this new site, which is best described as a pitch-perfect homage to the sex-suffused mediocrity many older viewers grew up on. With scouts! Bravo, Say Uncle, this site starts off like a horror show and ends up like a four-hour-long movie about a housewife peeling potatoes.
