Review of Sleepaway Camp (1983) by Jeannie B — 12 Jul 2012

Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzik, 1983).

I was scanning the shelves yesterday, in the mood for bad horror. Well, okay, I'm usually in the mood for bad horror. And there, sitting neglected in a dusty corner staring at me was the big, ugly Sleepaway Camp box. I'd seen snatches of the movies previously (and, as I discovered about an hour and a half later, I'd actually seen the second film before, though long enough ago that I never reviewed it-but more on that later), but I'd never sat down and watched the whole train wreck all the way through. And so away I went. A little over five hours later, I'd watched the first three. I'm still trying to decide if I'm enough of a masochist to watch the surviving footage form the original cut of the fourth film (which, according to a rumor published by Fangoria, was finally completed in November 2010) and Return to Sleepaway Camp, which brings Robert Hiltzik back into the fold. But again, I get ahead of myself.

Plot: a nice, well-adjusted gay couple (and how rare was that in movies in 1983?) take the kids out to the lake for a lovely day of frolicking. All well and good, except a counselor from the camp across the lake allows an inexperienced driver behind the wheel of a speedboat. This being Hollywood, we know nothing good can come of that. In short, there's an ugly accident, and the kids' uncle dies. Fast-forward eight years, and Angela, who survived the accident, is living with her cousin Ricky (played as teens by Nikos the Impaler's Felissa Rose and The Perfect House's Jonathan Tiersten respectively) and Ricky's mom, Aunt Martha (Under Surveillance's Desiree Gould), who is sending them off to, yes, the very camp across the lake from where the accident occurred. Ricky has been going there for three years; it's Angela's first trip. Angela's not, shall we say, well-socialized, and soon enough, those in the camp who wish her ill start dying in horrible ways.

While the movie is amusing, perhaps even endearing, in a cult sort of way (it still survives on the midnight movie circuit; in fact, it played on the big screen near me last Saturday night), it's horrid. There's a reason Desiree Gould didn't get an acting job between 1983 and 2006. I've seen a lot of bad acting over the years, but I'm not sure anything can quite hold a candle to that. The rest of the cast is miles better, though keep in mind that everything's relative.

Then there's the big twist. No, I'm not talking about the identity of the killer (you didn't have that figured out right after the first attack? Go back and watch it again, paying very close attention to the sequence of events...), but the thing about the killer. Yeah, that thing. While I'm pretty sure every horror fan knows about the twist ending to this flick, in case you don't, I'm not going to spoil it for you. And I have to admit, the setup for the twist isn't terrible. It's obvious Hiltzik, who also wrote the script, had thought this out pretty well. Problem is, what he was thinking is just outright offensive. It's pretty much in line with serial killer mentality form the early eighties (I'd tell you to think The Beast Within here, except all that stuff got cut out of the film adaptation), but Hiltzik wanted to put a slightly different spin on it. Boy, did he ever. (I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you that the happy, well-adjusted gay couple raising children is a big part of the mechanism, as we find out in one flashback scene, but that's not the main bit.) Still, there are times when I'm willing to overlook the stupidity of psychological profiling done by amateurs writing horror novels; The Beast Within is one of my favorite horror novels of the eighties. But when you combine it with acting this awful, an effects budget that may have topped out at three hundred bucks, and a lack of pacing that makes this film border on the comedic for most of its length, well, I hope the people going to see it on the big screen at midnight are stopping off at a few bars before they get there. I can't imagine ever watching this sober again. *.