Review of Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) by Ifiok O — 12 Jul 2012

Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (Michael A. Simpson, 1988).

I realized roughly five minutes into Unhappy Campers that I'd seen it before, but when I went through the spreadsheet and the reviews, I can't see where I ever actually wrote anything about it. Thus, I soldiered on into a second trip through a movie so depressingly bad that by the end of it, I almost appreciated the first one.

It's five years after the events in the first film. Angela, who has now changed her name to Angela Johnson, has undergone years of therapy, plus the odd surgery here and there, and has emerged fully transformed. Or so the doctors, think, anyway, and they've sent her off into the world with a raft of recommendations. So she gets a job... as a camp counselor. (Felissa Rose, by the by, was off attending college when this film was made, so casing director Shay Griffin grabbed Pamela Springsteen, whose fifteen minutes of fame were in Fast Times at Ridgemont High six years previous. And yes, she's Bruce's little sister.) We learn in the first scene that Angela, of course, is not transformed at all; when she finds a camper who's not her definition of a good kid, well, off with their head. (Or tongue. Or whatever.) After which she reports back to Uncle John (The African Queen's Walter Botell, the first of a few "how far the mighty have fallen" names who crop up in the second and third films in the franchise), the camp's owner/manager/something, that she has sent the camper home. Which leads to a lot of running "I hate it here, I wish Angela would send me home!" jokes.

Yes, unlike the first film-which played the horror angle straight-Unhappy Campers is meant as a comedy, and normally that would make it marginally bearable. But the acting isn't that much better here than it was in the first film, especially given some of the names surrounding it (Molly, a camper who befriends Angela early in the film, is played by Renee Estevez, Martin Sheen's daughter; the head counselor is played by Eight Is Enough veteran Brian Patrick Clarke, etc.), and the entire premise of the film rests on an absurdity one of the characters mentions in passing about not being able to remember the name of the psycho killer who cut a swath through all those campers five years ago. As if anyone ever forgets the name of an iconic serial killer. There are a couple of gruesomely amusing deaths, but it's still bad, bad, bad, and I say that as a diehard lover of B horror flicks. *.