Parents who suffer from sore arms from constantly beating their kids can go pay someone else to do it, as seen in the bloodcurdling teen behavior camp drama Jesus Land, written and directed by Saila Kariat. Adapted from the best-selling memoir by Julia Scheeres, it opens in 2014, with the adult Julia (Kelly Sullivan) walking on the beach in Florida, where she always wanted to be. She used to tell her brother, David (Xavier Jones), that someday they would both escape to Florida, getting thousands of miles away from the Hell they were trapped in. The film then flash cuts to rural Indiana in 1984, where teen Julia (Ella Anderson) gets caught breaking into a car for cassettes. When her father, Hank (Bryce Johnson), arrives at the station to take her home, Julia informs the police she would rather stay in jail.
Bruce kneels over a fallen camper as the teens watch from behind a rope at the behavior camp in Jesus Land.
“Rules are impossibly strict, and kids are encouraged to snitch on each other, so that the vicious Canadian, Bruce, will dispense the punishment.”
When her father and mother, Ruth (Juliette Lewis), show up in court to take her home, Julia informs the judge she would rather join David at the Christian behavior camp their parents sent him to. David was adopted by Julia’s parents, along with their other adopted brother, Jermaine (Jackson Coppins), who was older and always in trouble. Julia arrives in the Dominican Republic, where the camp is, and is greeted by Becky (Olivia Choate), who works there. Instead of life on a beach like the promotional video, the behavior camp is in the middle of the jungle with no electricity. Rules are impossibly strict, and kids are encouraged to snitch on each other, so that the vicious Canadian, Bruce (Kristian Bruun), will dispense the punishment. Unsupervised in the middle of nowhere, these punishments get way more violent than what the parents are told in the brochures…
Forget Amityville, as Jesus Land is the scariest true story you could sit down in front of. During the 80s, teen behavior camps took more teen lives than all the Friday The 13th movies put together. Even those that got out alive never stopped being haunted, despite hoping with each passing decade it would sting less. As adults are believed more than teens, we had to wait for many victims to grow up to report what went down. Scheeres’s book was able to get the camp she was held in closed down, one of many overseas camps where American teens can get brutalized out of anyone’s jurisdiction. While there may have been parents that genuinely believed in the rehabilitation services being offered, Jesus Land makes it clear that many of the parents would abuse their kids as badly as the camp did, if not worse.
"…makes it clear just how savage the 80s could be behind closed doors..."
