Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare

This documentary tells the story of the youth therapy programs that were founded by the now late Steve Cartisano. Really it doesn't take a genius to figure out these things will end up most of the time very badly, you're mixing rebellious teens with the wilderness, with figures of authority that rely on corporal punishment and abuse their power and you've got a recipe for disaster.

The doc was okay but I felt it could've had more of an impact, I would've maybe done less screen time from Steve's family, since they weren't in the camps and what I believe the viewer is looking for was more first person accounts of what happened. I think we could've seen more stories that never made it to the screen. And the ones that did I felt were very rushed. They should've made this into a mini series and divided the stories so that we could've gotten more information and details with that format.

Maybe Steve had good intentions at the beginning but like a famous quote says "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" and these kids marched down that road far too many times before anybody put a stop to it.

From hiking the desert to child slave labor, this Steve. Cartisano guy was a real psychopath who preyed on distraught families once their kids started acted out. This man had a real evil about him that seemed obvious to most the kids but not the dumb parents who were paying outrageous fees just for their children to be bullied into behaving better, a method which always works. Steve is the real POS here no doubt about it but the documentary would have been better if we heard less from his wife who made him sound like a pioneer and almost heroic. Her along with their daughter keep trying to say he had nothing do with the bad things that happened, not only at 1 but 3 of his camps since he was never there. Not really a great argument for a man preaching how much he cares.

I get showing the full perspective and including every voice, but maybe 3/4ths of the people interviewed in this documentary defend the camps and Steve Cartisano's actions instead of talking about what went on and interviewing more victims. It's honestly disheartening,- the ex-wife, daughter, and ex-camp counselor don't show much (or any) empathy. When they talk about how a teen died at the camp, the wife mentions how upset it made Steve and then starts complaining about the court-case, and the daughter complains about the news coverage while coming across as very arrogant.

It felt like a lot of this was intended to diminish the degree of the abuse that went on and excuse or justify what Cartisano did. It did well when telling the stories of the survivors, but unfortunately falls short otherwise.

I was in the last group to run-in in Utah before the state of Utah shut them down. I still have scars on my body the whole time I was there. I had sores that I'd have to walk on for four months. I was 13..never did drugs, never drank alcohol, never partied, never had a run-in with the , and was still a virgin, just a normal teenager who didn't pick up her room. My mom thought this would be a way to get me to "be a good girl". The description of "out of control teenagers" is wrong... there were a lot of normal kids there. Kids with parents that just didn't want to be a parent.. or in my case just wanted someone to teach me a lesson.

I think the piece grants more screen time than required to cover the muddled opinions of Steve Cartisano's family (who sound so full of themselves) and much less on the victims and the tragedies they faced. That could either be an error in judgment on the filmmaker's part or, most likely, a Netflix decision to try to soften the emotional blow until the closing moments. Institutionalized abuse and the resulting trauma are discussed in all their somber detail, in what feels like American parents trying to run behind quick fixes for habitual (and often psychological) issues of their teenagers.

While I'm not surprised that wilderness therapy camps continue to exist in the States, given there are people who willingly sign up for haunted experiences and get tormented (oh, watch that documentary too if you must), what bothers me is how some folks still believe in the ideology of putting teenagers through clearly abusive methods to "teach them a lesson" and "turn them into good people". And if you're you're gonna say "Stuff like this would never happen in 2023", then I guess you're the one living under a rock. Worse things happens today.