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Sleepaway Camp
[Media Home Entertainment]
1984; color
Directed by Robert Hiltzik
Starring:Mike Kellin, Jonathan Tierten, Felissa Rose, Paul De Angelo, Christopher Collet, Karen Fields, Katherine Kamhi & John E. Dunn
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Sleepaway Camp enjoys a reputation as being only a notch below Friday The 13th in terms of all-time great camp themed slasher movies, which is some pretty high praise. Believe it or not—it actually lives up to that rep. by taking a tried and true plot, throwing in a few legitimate surprises, and even making the predictable parts interesting. The brief backstory concerns a father and his young son and daughter; two of whom are quickly killed off in a boating accident. Flash forward eight years and we see a boy (Ricky) and girl (Angela) being sent off to summer camp by their seemingly eccentric, if not downright loony, mom. Turns out she's the mother of the boy and the aunt of the girl but she's raising them as siblings. Once the two get settled at camp, we get introduced to the rest of the cast - your average assortment of pre-teens, adolescents and post driver's license aged counselors as well as a lonely camp owner in his 50s and a creepy looking kitchen staff. Along with the usual camp activities (including those between the boys and girls), there's also the usual amount of tormenting and bullying. Soon we learn that, possibly due to some of this tormenting and bullying, Angela hasn't uttered a word or eaten since camp started three days ago; and her counselor is pissed. She reports the girl to the head counselor, who takes her into the kitchen and leaves her with the cook so he can give whatever food she wants. Unfortunately, the cook is a total perv and has other ideas about what to do with young Angela in the pantry. His effort are quickly thwarted when her very protective cousin / brother interrupts and saves her. Soon after we get the a POV of someone sneaking up behind the cook, which eventually leads to him being hideously burned by a giant vat of boiling water. He's not killed, but he is wrapped up like a mummy and wheeled out on a gurney, screaming in agony. The camp owner then raises the kitchen staff's pay in an effort to hide this "accident" from the campers, and everything gets quiet and calm again. For about ten minutes. Then one unlucky camper bites the dust via a good old fashioned drowning, and a counselor dies by having a beehive dropped on his head (while he's on the toilet). What did these two people have in common? They each hassled either Ricky or Angela. At this point everyone at the camp begins freaking out and, before long, only a handful of people remain… and even their numbers are dwindling as a bitchy female counselor gets hara-kiri'd (in the back) through the wall of a shower stall, and her equally bitchy camper gal-pal gets a hot curling iron fatally inserted where no hot curling iron should go. By now the camp owner is really flipping out and decided to go after who he thinks is the killer. He's wrong of course, and his mistake nets him an arrow through the throat. While all this is going on, there's a dance held for the remaining campers. Just before it begins, Angela (who has finally started talking) tells the boy who likes her, Paul, to meet her at the lake at the end of the night. As the remaining counselors find out about all the grisly goings-on going on around them, they try in vain to locate all the kids. They account for all the living campers (and come across a couple of the dead ones, as well as a beaten up but very much alive Ricky) but they still can't find Angela and / or Paul. Finally they find them down by the lake where they see Angela sitting with Paul's head in her lap. Unfortunately for Paul, his body is a couple feet away. Then it's time for one of the most gender-bending conclusions ever to appear in a slasher movie; it's also an ending that offers absolutely no real closure. What more can I say? Even if you didn't go to overnight camp in the 1970s, you're probably still gonna get a big kick out of this one.
—the Kommandant
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