You've carefully crafted a serious modern-day dark fantasy/horror campaign for your group – World of Darkness, WitchCraft, In Nomine, or what have you. You've planned foul villains, horrific demons, deep moral quandaries, and deeds of global, metaphysical importance for your players' pleasure.

You've dimmed the lights. You've queued up the ominous music. Play begins.

Somebody cracks a joke.

And it's a good joke, dammit. Everybody's laughing now. Even you. You can't even bring yourself to be pissed off at Captain Comedian over there for breaking the mood.

But dedicated GM that you are, you trudge on, doing your best to re-assert control.

Except now that joke's stuck in everyone's heads, making it impossible to take the game seriously. Inevitably, someone else cracks a joke. Followed by another. And another. Every event, no matter how horrific, prompts a wisecrack, a humorous movie reference, or – God forbid – a pun.

Ah, screw it, you decide. You pick up the comedic ball and run with it…

…and end up with one of the best games ever.

That's the sense I get from Demon Hunters: Dead Camper Lake (hereafter DCL), in which the good folks at Dead Gentlemen Productions, the minds behind the hilarious RPG comedy The Gamers, show they don't need gaming jargon for laughs. This may not be a directly RPG-related movie, but it positively oozes gamer mentality.

It's the story of Chris (Steve Wolbrecht), a clueless accounting student, and his reluctant mentor Gabriel (Nathan Rice), a cooler-than-thou monster hunter literally on a mission from God. As the movie begins, Chris and Gabriel have just survived the costly slaying of Duamerthrax, a demon who terrorized Chris's college campus and wiped out Gabriel's team of sanctified commandos. Now the two are off to the nearest safe house for Gabriel's holy brotherhood: the unpromisingly named Dead Camper Lake.

Duamerthrax is still alive, of course. But that's okay. They run over him on the way there.

(Bear in mind that the opening credits have yet to roll.)

Despite the imagery conjured by the name, there are no nubile camp counselors stalked by indestructible masked lunatics awaiting them at Dead Camper Lake – just a werewolf, a vampire, a laconic time-traveling gunman, a fedora-wearing birch tree, a purple ninja, and other assorted supernatural lunacy thrown out with gleeful nerdy abandon.

The Dead Gentlemen serve up a smorgasbord of geek-favorite comedy styles, from Monty Python's warped logic to Bruce Campbell's hyperactive slapstick. Make no mistake, this is a B-movie; however, it's a completely self-aware B-movie that knows its limits and turns them to its advantage. The low-budget special effects only make the intentionally ridiculous action that much more ridiculous, for example. And even at its most unpolished, the acting – which prominently features the kind of vaguely-accented, laughably self-important bombast so common in gaming sessions – is intentionally rather than inadvertently funny, only faltering during the few brief flirtations with drama. (Ironically, the characters in DCL often sound more like real gamers than do their counterparts in The Gamers.) Gabriel drowning his sorrows in the Dead Camper Lake saloon while Chris consoles him on piano with the "Demon Hunter Blues" is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. (In fact, the entire original soundtrack perfectly suits the movie.) Scriptwriter Matt Vancil clearly has a great time hamming it up as Duamerthrax, and director Don Early keeps an admirably straight face while delivering the Agent Smith-style lines of Silent Jim, the enigmatic demon hunter who "exists outside of time".

Not all of the B-movie aspects of the production are so endearing, however. On my copy of The Gamers, the Spanish subtitles appeared by default and couldn't be removed by the on-screen menu – only by the subtitle button on the remote control. Well, my copy of DCL has the same issue, only with the English subtitles. As it turned out, though, this flaw proved to be an advantage: the sound was bad enough in places to make me miss some good lines. Having figured out how to turn the subtitles off, I quickly turned them back on again.

If the premise of the movie sounds like a sequel, that's because it is. The DVD also includes the original Dead Gentlemen flick, Demon Hunters, which shows the aforementioned campus rampage by Duamerthrax and his battle with Gabriel's team. Not quite as completely over-the-top nor as deftly amateur-by-design as its sequel, it's still got that great Dead Gentlemen style. I just wish it had been packaged more clearly as the predecessor to DCL rather than as just another extra, so that I'd have known to watch it first. Granted, we're not talking the Godfather Trilogy here, so the montage at the beginning of DCL got me up to speed just fine. Still, some of the gags in DCL work better when set up by events in Demon Hunter.

Other extras include a "Making of..." feature, outtakes, and deleted scenes. I loved the outtakes, but the deleted scenes gave me a bit of trouble – it seemed as though the first one I played led directly into the rest of the movie rather than stopping at the end of the clip.

But is the DVD worth the price, despite its flaws? Well, $20 seems a little steep for a B-movie – however entertaining – but not outrageous. There are two full-length features here, after all, plus extras. (And I'm an admitted DVD cheapskate, seldom buying one until it hits the bargain bin.)