“Only the British could promote, sustain and actually enjoy the unique institution of Holiday Camps, so totally regimented that they have a near military status, and, for outsiders, an element of horror suggestive of Concentration Camps! A Grand Hotel type of omnibus, Holiday Camp mixes stories of pathos, romance, melodrama and comedy, and is interesting not only as an oblique social statement, but as a showcase for a variety of good British performers. With typical logic, British studios for some reason assumed that a background as a documentarian qualified one for making comedies, and a number of fine British realist film-makers (Harry Watt earlier on, Ken Annakin here) made their narrative-film debuts with comedies. Just as the American The Egg And I spawned a whole series of Ma and Pa Kettle films, so Holiday Camp, with its class-conscious attitudes, spawned the equally prolific Huggett Family series, here making their first (and probably last) appearance at the Pacific Film Archive. Incidentally, the sex killer played by Dennis Price was patterned on a notorious (and prolific) killer who operated in just such a milieu and fortuitously was caught and hanged just prior to the production of Holiday Camp.”