Review of Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989) by Tim S — 09 Jun 2011

Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland (Michael A. Simpson, 1989).

After suffering through the first two movies in the Sleepaway Camp franchise, I have to wonder what on earth possessed me to go onto the third, other than a burning desire to finish the box set and get it out of my house. But I have to admit...despite the third being the lowest-budget movie of them all, and despite it being basically shot as leftovers from the second film (the two movies were shot back-to-back with the same locations, etc., an old Roger Corman "how to make movies for five hundred bucks" trick), I think it's the strongest of the three, for reasons we'll delve into eventually.

Plot: a year after the events of the second film, an enterprising older couple, Herman and Lily Miranda (Michael J. Pollard, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Bonnie and Clyde, Norma Rae's Sandra Dorsey) and uses the spot for an experimental sort of camp: it will bring together teenagers from both sides of the tracks in an attempt to get them to better understand one another's lives. You can already tell how well this is going to work. In any case, Angela slips in by offing one of the inner-city campers with a garbage truck in the movie's funniest scene, then catching her ride back to Angela's old stomping grounds, where she quickly discovers that, yet again, the campers don't live up to her expectations. (At one point, in frustration, she yells, "why did I expect things to be different this year?" Indeed.) As with the last film, where she had Molly, she discovers one camper with a generally sweet nature, Marcia (The First Power's Tracy Griffith). Maybe she'll finally find someone worth saving?

The Sleepaway Camp movies were always about cardboard cutouts getting killed, but there's actually a glimmer of characterization in this one between Marcia and one of the underprivileged kids, Tony (2012's Mark Oliver), with whom she strikes up a tentative relationship. (I don't know if it's a spoiler, so I'll tell you to skip to the end of this parenthesis if you don't wanna know: there's a great one-liner at the end that shows just how off Angela is in reading Marcia's character. But if you're not paying attention, you might miss it.) I guess it couldn't be helped, since the idea behind Fritz Godron's script pretty much forced examination of some social issues-and did so in at least slightly more sensitive a way than did the idiocy of the first film. I wish there'd been more of that sort of thing; you can't put an Asian woman who goes by the name "Arab" in a movie and not explore that, though they do here-but someone at least made the effort in a few places. Don't get me wrong, it's just as dumb as the first two, but at least it's dumb with a scrim of substance. **.