I wear my love for trash cinema as a badge of honor. I have always believed that life is defined by failure more often than by success, and both of which can be hard to measure. A lot of achievements of the past are now universally reviled by those who look back and analyze them. Case in point: the slasher film. These movies mostly got mixed to bad reviews but made a lot of money, so can typically be considered successful by that metric. However, with their success came the cheapening of the horror genre, in my opinion. With that being the case, I have never liked them, and this one might be the worst I have ever seen.
Sleepaway Camp is about a quiet girl named Angela who gets sent to summer camp and because of her quiet nature is bullied by everyone else at the camp. One by one her tormentors are murdered in disgusting ways. Every death is more ridiculous than the next. Bees eat a kid alive. I’m not sure bees actually do that. Who is behind it all?
Everyone in this movie is insane. The camp cook is an admitted pedophile, and his friends just laugh at him like it’s a joke when he comments on underage girls. Everyone at the camp is cruel, even if you exclude the one murdering everybody. You know it’s bad when I start thinking maybe the bullies have this one right. Angela is creepy, and she is killing the vibe of summer time fun and hijinks at Sleepaway Camp. Maybe they are taking it a bit far, but it was hard to care about Angela or anyone for that matter.
One kid has a shirt on that just says “Jogging Shirt.” Seemed a bit ironic for the 1980s.
The movie is just bad on multiple levels. Chances are this movie would have ended up on the trash heap of cinema history and forgotten if not for the ending. Apparently, when the filmmakers were wrapping up production, they realized their movie was nothing special and decided to reshoot the ending into something they thought would get everyone’s attention. Well, it did. Look up it up if you want to know, but I’ll keep this spoiler free. You don’t need to know anything about the movie to understand what happens. The ending only made this movie worse, though, and it really never should have been made at all. Is it horror? It’s not really scary. It is supposed to be kind of a comedy? It’s not funny at all unless you are a psychopath.
I’m giving this one 1/10 cases of Chek Cola.
“She’s a real carpenter’s dream. Flat as a board and needs a screw!”
“Eat shit and die, Ricky!”
“Eat shit and live, Bill.”