‘Camp Nowhere’: the Disney children’s movie that starred two cult leaders
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Hollywood history is littered with unusual coincidences, and they don’t come much stranger than two stars of a family-friendly Disney movie ending up holding positions in organisations that were later alleged to be cults, although one is admittedly much clearer cut than the other.
Directed by Jonathan Prince, 1994’s Camp Nowhere isn’t even good (or bad) enough to become a cult favourite (pun possibly intended) among the audience who grew up watching it, ironically or not. It was one of the countless turgid kids’ films the ‘Mouse House’ has been churning out for decades, and its unusual legacy might well be the only interesting thing about it.
The by-the-numbers narrative is derivative of a thousand other children’s flicks, with a youngster and his friends thoroughly miserable after being dispatched to a summer computer camp. To try and make the best of a bad situation, they blackmail Christopher Lloyd’s teacher to pose as a counsellor for an entirely fictitious camp of their own, opening the doors for a fun-filled time, until their parents turn up to visit.
So far, so formulaic, if it wasn’t for the fact that Camp Nowhere featured early roles for 10 Things I Hate About You‘s Andrew Keegan and Smallville‘s Allison Mack. The latter served 21 months behind bars for being a high-ranking associate and confidant of Keith Raniere, who co-founded the NXIVM group, and was sentenced to 120 years in prison for being at the forefront of the organisation.
NXIVM’s cult credentials are pretty cut and dried, but Keegan’s situation is different. He was most certainly accused of being a cult leader, which he denied, naturally. “I don’t know anybody else that’s being called a cult leader, so it’s kind of like a badge of honour,” he said on the Pod Meets World podcast.
What is true is that Keegan founded Full Circle in 2014, which he described as “a non-denominational spiritual community centre where people of all beliefs and backgrounds come together to meditate, practice yoga, and engage artistically,” so take from that what you will, although the organisation was shuttered in 2017, two years after it was raided for selling kombucha without a licence, but the actor wasn’t there at the time.
“Looking back, it was insane,” he added. “I was putting down tens of thousands of dollars, but we opened it up and spent three years and really did build an amazing friend group,” with Full Circle’s headquarters located in an “old Hare Krishna” temple. Again, not necessarily a cult, even if a 2014 deep dive by Shyam Dodge and Shanrah Wakefield sought to paint a slightly different story.
Read more https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/disney-childrens-movie-starred-two-cult-leaders/
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