Sleepaway CampThey say that still waters run deep, but who knows what mysteries may lurk beneath the surface of the dark water? ("Water snakes", perhaps...) Sleepaway Camp is a summer camp slasher movie--yeah, like Friday the 13th--where kids just hitting puberty generally run around acting like little jerks, and the predominantly sleazeball staff spend their time making life hell for the kids. Camp returnee Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) brings his painfully quiet cousin, Angela (Felissa Rose), with him this year, where she is confronted with a smattering of wicked bullies and depraved adults, who coincidentally start getting picked off one by one.
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The Eighties were positively bloated with low-budget slasher flicks, thanks again to the (inscrutable, in my opinion) success of the likes of Friday the 13th, et cetera. Sleepaway Camp superficially falls into this (ahem) camp neatly, but unlike its counterparts, it feels a bit...off...I mean, more than the usual fare. To elaborate, I feel compelled to mention that discussing Sleepaway Camp--and what makes it special, in its own way--necessitates spoiling it in its entirety. So, spoilers ahoy, matey! Like the film's protagonist, Sleepaway Camp is fundamentally conflicted. At times, it wants to be a "coming of age" story, although I'd argue that this is a pale veneer at best. I mean, sure, I've been to summer camp, and I had some counsellors who were jerks (I still resent the one who stole my Tiger handheld of Mega Man 2, but I digress). And I had some "stories" from camp--pretty tame ones compared to the movies, mind you--like how I stepped on a rusty nail playing capture the flag, and had to hobble my way across a baseball field to the nurse's office because no one would come to help me, but again, I digress. But Sleepaway Camp wants to be two (or three) different stories wrapped in one. At its core, it is a slasher, with increasingly grisly scenes of mutilation, dismemberment, third-degree burns, drowning, and (my favorite) death by beehive--which given the severity of the wounds inflicted, must have been a hive for "murder hornets" or something. But even Friday the 13th--I know, I know, but constant comparisons are unavoidable--wasn't really trying to be a teen summer camp movie at all. Furthermore--and this is where the major spoilers for this movie's undeniably (and infamously) shocking ending comes in--Sleepaway Camp also touches on themes of gender identity and sexuality, albeit in a strange and unsettling way. (And what I mean by that is, if you aren't unsettled by the ending of Sleepaway Camp, you've got stronger nerves than me, brother.) Now, Sleepaway Camp is not a long movie, either, coming in at just shy of an hour and a half. So trying to cram all of these ideas into this movie feels jumbled and unfocused...not unlike the tribulations that come with growing up, I suppose. (I'm being generous; I don't actually believe that this was deliberate.)
If I've been a bit too coy with those "spoilers" I mentioned earlier, well the big secret that gives the ending of Sleepaway Camp its punch--sucker punch, more like--is that Angela is, in fact, a boy. No, Felissa Rose who plays Angela is not a boy, which somehow still makes this blindside of an ending the least bizarre aspect of it. (Primal howling ,along with Angela's nigh-distended jaw, and naked body, covered in blood, with some wonky--yet as a result, surprisingly more effective--matte shots putting Angela's head on a nude boy's body certainly takes the cake.) Let's rewind a bit. The prologue of Sleepaway Camp depicts a boating accident which took the lives of Angela's father, John Baker (Dan Tursi), and her sister--the real Angela (Colette Lee Corcoran)--leaving only the young boy, Peter (Frank Sorrentino), as the sole survivor of the family. Peter is taken in by her aunt, the thoroughly batty Dr. Martha Thomas (Desiree Gould), who--owing to having a boy (Ricky) already--somehow believes that forcing a kind of gender reassignment on Peter is preferable. Let's add to this that John was a homosexual, and that she and Peter once saw him and his lover, Lenny (James Paradise), in bed together--further implying that the two children experimented with this for themselves--and you have a wildly gender/sexually confused main character. Now, this is where contemporary attitudes toward gender identity and sexuality will invariably be compared with those presented in Sleepaway Camp. To address this and close the issue, my thought is that Sleepaway Camp--like Glen or Glenda before it (maybe not the best example, but hear me out)--may have something to say about this topic, but ultimately finds that it's never going to be received by the film's intended audience, so it amounts to little more than an oddball footnote, a justification for the killer's state of mind. For Sleepaway Camp, which is a slasher first, this becomes something akin to Hitchcock's Psycho (yeah, that's a better comparison), where the person we least suspected is the killer because they've been mentally damaged over a protracted period of time--made alien to the film's audience, to put it another way. Maybe it's not a popular read in 2023, but I'm sure no one looking for a twisted horror movie like Sleepaway Camp in 1983 took this to be exploitative. It just happened to be a convenient justification for making Angela the killer in a movie where it's probably the case that precious little thought was given to wrapping up the plot with any measure of subtlety or delicacy.
I don't think that anyone is going to come into watching Sleepaway Camp with the expectation that it's some masterstroke in filmmaking, even in the horror genre. After all, it's positively saturated in genre clichés (and all of the subgenres it dabbles in), so originality is the last thing you can hope for here. There's precious few characters in the movie that you can sympathize with--a staple of the slasher, sure. Heck, even Ricky is a punk, often pranking a bunkmate called "Mozart" (Willy Kuskin) with some pretty lame jokes. (That this "Mozart" pulls a knife on Ricky following a bit with shaving cream tells me that maybe the two examples we see were only the tip of the iceberg in this long-running routine of degradation.) Frankly, many, many of the people at Camp Arawak are scum. Let's start with the head chef, Artie (Owen Hughes), who--in no uncertain terms--tells his colleagues that he intends to molest the underage girls, which they shockingly laugh off. Seriously. After he tries to pull this on Angela and Ricky catches him, Artie outright threatens them both. So when he gets doused in boiling hot water--by an off-screen Angela, to preserve the mystery--we don't feel bad. In a way, we're rooting for Artie getting his just desserts. But instead of being horrified at Artie's fate, the owner of the camp, Mel Costic (Mike Kellin), bribes the rest of the kitchen to keep silent on the event. (!!!) Oh, it gets better! Essentially, anyone who slights Angela gets killed after this, but...heavens, we never really feel bad about it, either. After all, Angela is a kind--if withdrawn--young girl. She is polite (even if her cousin isn't), so all that this signifies is that everyone else sucks and gets what they deserve. Okay, but Angela doesn't look like a killer; in fact, she looks like the complete opposite, so already Sleepaway Camp is toying with your expectations, dividing your feelings versus the rationale that of course Angela has the most to gain from their deaths. Sleepaway Camp pulls a lot of questionable sleight of hand on its audience, like when Angela's horrible counselor, Meg (Katherine Kamhi), is in her bunk, and the killer stands in silhouette at the threshold. Obviously, the killer's face belongs to Ricky, but ain't nobody buyin' that he's the killer, so what's the intent here? It's probably meant to foreshadow that Angela's really the killer, but this is far from the first (or last) instance where Sleepaway Camp is too coy for its own good. The movie doesn't really know how to express what it truly is at heart, so it awkwardly fumbles with hinting and alluding to its true nature. It's uncomfortable in its own skin, so it tries many approaches without fully committing. Hmm...maybe it is saying something there...
Recommended for: Fans of a jumbled teen summer camp/slasher movie that dabbles in themes of identity, but never really emerges from the depths of the multitudinous, Eighties-era swamp of low-budget horror flicks. Yet despite this, there is--even if inadvertently--something compelling about this confused movie with its overwhelmingly chilling ending that makes it a cult classic.
If I've been a bit too coy with those "spoilers" I mentioned earlier, well the big secret that gives the ending of Sleepaway Camp its punch--sucker punch, more like--is that Angela is, in fact, a boy. No, Felissa Rose who plays Angela is not a boy, which somehow still makes this blindside of an ending the least bizarre aspect of it. (Primal howling ,along with Angela's nigh-distended jaw, and naked body, covered in blood, with some wonky--yet as a result, surprisingly more effective--matte shots putting Angela's head on a nude boy's body certainly takes the cake.) Let's rewind a bit. The prologue of Sleepaway Camp depicts a boating accident which took the lives of Angela's father, John Baker (Dan Tursi), and her sister--the real Angela (Colette Lee Corcoran)--leaving only the young boy, Peter (Frank Sorrentino), as the sole survivor of the family. Peter is taken in by her aunt, the thoroughly batty Dr. Martha Thomas (Desiree Gould), who--owing to having a boy (Ricky) already--somehow believes that forcing a kind of gender reassignment on Peter is preferable. Let's add to this that John was a homosexual, and that she and Peter once saw him and his lover, Lenny (James Paradise), in bed together--further implying that the two children experimented with this for themselves--and you have a wildly gender/sexually confused main character. Now, this is where contemporary attitudes toward gender identity and sexuality will invariably be compared with those presented in Sleepaway Camp. To address this and close the issue, my thought is that Sleepaway Camp--like Glen or Glenda before it (maybe not the best example, but hear me out)--may have something to say about this topic, but ultimately finds that it's never going to be received by the film's intended audience, so it amounts to little more than an oddball footnote, a justification for the killer's state of mind. For Sleepaway Camp, which is a slasher first, this becomes something akin to Hitchcock's Psycho (yeah, that's a better comparison), where the person we least suspected is the killer because they've been mentally damaged over a protracted period of time--made alien to the film's audience, to put it another way. Maybe it's not a popular read in 2023, but I'm sure no one looking for a twisted horror movie like Sleepaway Camp in 1983 took this to be exploitative. It just happened to be a convenient justification for making Angela the killer in a movie where it's probably the case that precious little thought was given to wrapping up the plot with any measure of subtlety or delicacy.
I don't think that anyone is going to come into watching Sleepaway Camp with the expectation that it's some masterstroke in filmmaking, even in the horror genre. After all, it's positively saturated in genre clichés (and all of the subgenres it dabbles in), so originality is the last thing you can hope for here. There's precious few characters in the movie that you can sympathize with--a staple of the slasher, sure. Heck, even Ricky is a punk, often pranking a bunkmate called "Mozart" (Willy Kuskin) with some pretty lame jokes. (That this "Mozart" pulls a knife on Ricky following a bit with shaving cream tells me that maybe the two examples we see were only the tip of the iceberg in this long-running routine of degradation.) Frankly, many, many of the people at Camp Arawak are scum. Let's start with the head chef, Artie (Owen Hughes), who--in no uncertain terms--tells his colleagues that he intends to molest the underage girls, which they shockingly laugh off. Seriously. After he tries to pull this on Angela and Ricky catches him, Artie outright threatens them both. So when he gets doused in boiling hot water--by an off-screen Angela, to preserve the mystery--we don't feel bad. In a way, we're rooting for Artie getting his just desserts. But instead of being horrified at Artie's fate, the owner of the camp, Mel Costic (Mike Kellin), bribes the rest of the kitchen to keep silent on the event. (!!!) Oh, it gets better! Essentially, anyone who slights Angela gets killed after this, but...heavens, we never really feel bad about it, either. After all, Angela is a kind--if withdrawn--young girl. She is polite (even if her cousin isn't), so all that this signifies is that everyone else sucks and gets what they deserve. Okay, but Angela doesn't look like a killer; in fact, she looks like the complete opposite, so already Sleepaway Camp is toying with your expectations, dividing your feelings versus the rationale that of course Angela has the most to gain from their deaths. Sleepaway Camp pulls a lot of questionable sleight of hand on its audience, like when Angela's horrible counselor, Meg (Katherine Kamhi), is in her bunk, and the killer stands in silhouette at the threshold. Obviously, the killer's face belongs to Ricky, but ain't nobody buyin' that he's the killer, so what's the intent here? It's probably meant to foreshadow that Angela's really the killer, but this is far from the first (or last) instance where Sleepaway Camp is too coy for its own good. The movie doesn't really know how to express what it truly is at heart, so it awkwardly fumbles with hinting and alluding to its true nature. It's uncomfortable in its own skin, so it tries many approaches without fully committing. Hmm...maybe it is saying something there...
Recommended for: Fans of a jumbled teen summer camp/slasher movie that dabbles in themes of identity, but never really emerges from the depths of the multitudinous, Eighties-era swamp of low-budget horror flicks. Yet despite this, there is--even if inadvertently--something compelling about this confused movie with its overwhelmingly chilling ending that makes it a cult classic.