Is Sleepaway Camp a Bad Good Movie or a Good Bad Movie?
Released in 1983, Sleepaway Camp is truly a one-of-a-kind movie. While it certainly capitalizes not just on the slasher genre, but in particular the summer camp subplot made famous by Friday the 13th and its imitators like The Burning, its ending propels it to some kind of weird John Waters territory.
It’s a strange film. And fortunately, it’s a pretty well known one at this point, as being a classic of the slasher genre.
It has its place in pop culture, though I’d imagine many who see it might not realize why.
The reason I’m writing this is because Sleepaway Camp truly messes with my brain. In many ways, it’s an awful movie, with awful performances, strange editing, and bad direction. But it’s also weirdly creative, and not just for the ending. So I’ve decided to ask myself: is it a good bad movie or a bad good movie?
I am ruling this movie out as far as being genuinely good. It has far too many technical failings and just strange things overall to not be considered truly great.
Part 1: Satire(?)
One of the foremost elements of the slasher genre is its hypersexualization, particularly of female characters. That’s all here, but it’s handled so strangely. Most slasher movies are concerned with sex for characters who are like 16–18, which sort of makes sense. Take a look at some examples:
Halloween — the movie largely credited with establishing the slasher genre — has three main high school female characters, and two of them are obsessed with sex.
Friday the 13th has two characters having sex, though the sequels would definitely up this element with skinny dipping, people getting killed while having sex, etc.
Early on in The Burning — Harvey Weinstein’s first film — a female character takes a shower while a male character (who I think is supposed to be likable) watches.
A Nightmare on Elm Street has a character killed shortly after having sex with her boyfriend. And a naked woman — though we don’t see anything explicit — is attacked in her bathtub. So here we get a bit of a different angle of sex being used to emphasize vulnerability.
That idea is sort of developed further with Wes Craven’s Scream, over a decade later. The main character — while she’s apparently been sexually active in the past — has gone a year or so without having sex with her boyfriend, despite his wishes. Of course, the two of them are attacked post-coitus.
Some of these elements exist in Sleepaway Camp.
A woman does get killed while naked in the shower, though we don’t see anything. She was planning on sleeping with someone as well.
But unlike other slasher movies, the nudity we see is entirely male.
Hell, even when there is no nudity it almost feels like there is.
It’s almost satirical in how different it is from other slasher movies. It’s almost like this is a feminist approach to the genre.
(But it’s definitely not. Just this aspect almost makes it feel like it would be.)
On top of that, the sexually driven people aren’t necessarily 16–18 year-olds as usual, but middle-aged pedophiles, and characters that are about 12 or so.
It’s…strange. But I think extending these high school situations to middle school kids is actually kind of interesting and something you don’t often see in movies.
2. Sexual Deviancy
There is most definitely a theme of sexual deviancy here, and it’s generally not that subtle.
There’s a pedophile cook that shares his pedophilic desires with his coworkers, who sort of laugh it off as a joke, or as if it’s endearing in a way. Anyways, he’s killed — or at least severely injured — shortly after coming onto a 12-year-old girl.
There’s a camp counselor who’s about 16 or 17 maybe, who has some kind of relationship with the camp owner, who’s about 60. Now you’d probably think that this is some sort of Harvey Weinstein situation where she’s made to do this, but the movie doesn’t really present it this way. The movie wants us to believe that she’s into it.
And on top of that, the main characters’ fathers are homosexual. This is actually captured pretty subtly in the opening scene, and it’s eventually shown in a flashback that this has deeply shaped at least one of our main characters. This obviously shouldn’t be considered sexual deviancy itself, but in the middle of the Reagan era, at the risk of putting more thought into this than writer-director Robert Hiltzik did, it’s possible this is an extension of the theme.
3. Adults and Kids
One of the most interesting aspects of this movie is how age difference just seems irrelevant. Like a lot of horror movies — and movies in general, to be honest — this movie casts what look like 30-somethings as about 18-year-olds. However, the actors playing 12-year-olds look like 12-year-olds, for the most part.
There’s an age difference here that’s visible, but largely ignored. Take the baseball scene, for instance.
You have a team of 12-year-olds beating a team of 18-year-olds, and talking trash while doing it. It’s just strange. These groups wouldn’t be athletic peers.
It seems to me that the two age groups really exist primarily for Judy to be able to mingle with the older boys and girls, while Ricky can’t really.
Except he can. He beat them in softball.
On top of that, I do love the vulgarity coming out of the 12-year-olds’ mouths. Ricky in particular is just amazing at swearing.
That’s something I really do like about this movie, because it feels authentic. Most movies nowadays wouldn’t have kids swearing like that, though to be fair, It did it. Maybe that kind of thing is making a comeback.
4. Anger
The emotion that I most associate with this movie is definitely anger. To be clear, the movie does not make me angry. But everyone — everyone — in the movie is angry.
Everyone has their breaking point in this movie, even the minor characters. In a scene that exists really only to reveal a corpse being found, it’s preceded by a camp worker being pissed off that the kids didn’t clean up after themselves.
People flip out at Angela constantly even though she doesn’t do anything. There’s a scene where two of the older boys ask her to go skinny dipping sort of as a joke/dare, and when she doesn’t respond — even though they expect her not to respond — they go crazy and end up getting in a fight with Angela’s cousin.
Mel, the camp owner, has a great scene after he finds his 18-year-old sort-of girlfriend dead. He accuses Ricky of doing it and flat-out threatens and harasses him. It’s insane.
5. The Twist
You can’t talk about this movie without talking about the twist ending. It’s one of the most iconic not just of the horror genre, but really of anything. It’s really the only reason anyone remembers this movie, if we’re being honest. But it is genuinely shocking if you don’t know it’s coming.
And it’s properly set up, too. It’s not just a shock for the sake of having a shock.
In the opening scene, a father is hanging around on the lake with his two kids, when there’s a boating accident, and both the father and one of the kids are killed.
The surviving kid, Angela, goes to live with her crazy aunt and cousin, Ricky. And ultimately, in the end, it’s revealed that she was a boy. The girl died in the opening scene and the boy lived, and the crazy aunt was so starved for having a little girl that she raised Angela as one.
And there are a few other moments in the movie that make this resonate all the more. At one point, Judy gets mad and asks Angela why she never showers when the others do. And the crazy aunt even says something about how she prepared all their medical information (she is a doctor).
6. The Acting
Let’s be honest: the acting is atrocious. Desiree Gould, who plays the aunt, is so strange, and apparently intentionally so. Sure, it’s revealed at the end that she herself was kind of crazy and the cause of all of this, but prior to that reveal, it just comes off as a truly terrible performance. It’s still an awful performance, but with the benefit of hindsight, one can see what they were trying to do.
I do love the performance of Jonathan Tiersten as Ricky, though. And Felissa Rose as Angela is alright. And I do like Mike Kellin as Mel.
Everyone else is absolutely terrible.
7. Miscellaneous
For a lot of slasher movies, the deaths themselves are really important. They don’t always have to be; the original Halloween didn’t have many or particularly memorable kills, but by 1983, people wanted to see memorable and creative death scenes. Look to the entire Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street series, for example.
In this movie, the deaths suck. Most of them don’t even seem like they’d result in a death, but rather a very serious injury.
And it’s not as if this movie is particularly atmospheric — like Halloween — to overcome these weak deaths. Though Mel’s death is pretty good, to be fair.
There is a terrible fake mustache in this movie at one point.
The wardrobe itself is worth noting.
I wasn’t around in the ’80s, but the costumes in this movie seem like how you would dress someone in a parody of ’80s movies. There’s a direct line between this and Wet Hot American Summer I guess is what I’m saying, from the male crop tops to the extremely short shorts.
The Verdict
While this movie definitely has many aspects to it that make it seem unprofessional and sort of community theater-y, there is that weird creative energy to it that makes it pretty good, in my opinion.
I enjoy this movie in spite of its flaws more than I enjoy it because of its flaws. Though some of its failings — the strange age difference and the performance of the aunt — certainly help make it more entertaining.
Still, I consider this more a bad good movie than a good bad movie.
