SLEEPAWAY CAMP
#31DaysOfHorror — October 5th
This October, for the second year in a row, I’ll be reviewing one horror movie each day! Respected classics, trashy and forgotten B-movies, both new frights and old… I love ‘em all. Well, some of them I’ll probably hate. We’ll see.
‘Sleepaway Camp’ (1983)
Directed by: Robert Hiltzik
Starring: Felissa Rose as “Angela”
Jonathan Tiersten as “Ricky”
Karen Fields as “Judy”
Mike Kellin as “Mel”
Robert Earl Jones as “Ben”
Desiree Gould as “Aunt Martha”
The Plot
After a horrific boating accident on a lake that takes the life of, um, someone, someone else (who seems certifiably insane from the very first three seconds she’s on camera) sends her two kids to summer camp!
One kid is Ricky; he’s a normal teenage boy, excited to spend summer in the woods with pretty girls. The other kid is Angela, his cousin; she’s a complete cipher who stares blankly at anyone who tries to talk to her.
Soon, people at the camp who have bothered Angela start dying. Is it Ricky, taking his instinctive overprotectiveness to new heights? Is it all a coincidence that the victims are people Angela’s encountered? Is it someone from Angela’s past, come back to haunt her? Totally couldn’t be Angela herself, could it?
My Review
Sleepaway Camp is one of those movies that’s so terrible, so absurdly, unbelievably inartfully constructed that it wraps all the way back around to being amazing, then it’s awful, then becomes incredible again. The acting is so horrifically bad that it’s scarier than most of the murders… and yet, somehow it’s fantastically endearing.
I don’t even know where to begin. No, that’s a lie, I do. Every slasher movie — good or bad — lives or dies on the strength of its kills, right? (Pun absolutely intended). For all of the numerous, numerous things wrong with Sleepaway Camp, from the acting to the set design to the script to the costumes to the pacing and beyond, it does its slashings right. Most of the killings happen off-camera, so at first you think you’ve gotten away without seeing anything too terrible. Or, depending on your point of view, you think the movie has gotten away without having to show you anything difficult. But then, suddenly, you see the aftermath of the murder, and the practical effects are visceral, shocking, sickening, gross… everything you’d want from a horror movie like this. Even the ones that aren’t graphically depicted (like a certain incident involving a curling iron) are filmed in an interesting, almost artistic way.
Oh. And then there’s the fact that Sleepaway Camp is one of the most homoerotic slasher movies of all time. Most slashers are all about showing off women, for a presumedly male audience, but not Sleepaway Camp. This one’s for the girls (and gays). It’s amazing, really; to paraphrase the How Did This Get Made? episode about the film, Camp Arawak is attended by 11 year old campers and 40 year old campers. Or are they counselors? It’s hard to tell, but the effect is hilarious. The men all wear absolutely minuscule short-shorts that show off absolutely everything, and they’re often either dressed in crop-top shirts that show off their shockingly hairy chests, like the gentleman in the header image above, or else they’re in hysterically tight muscle-shirts that almost let you see the surgical scars from where they got their pec implants.
The images at the top right and bottom left come from a scene where the male counselors (random campers in their 30s?) convince the girls to go skinny-dipping. Once they get to the lake late that night, the girls all say they aren’t into it; after some macho posturing, the guys decide they don’t care, and they all strip down and go skinny-dipping together anyway. “Who wants to go skinny-dipping with a bunch of guys?!” one of them asks another incredulously before this scene. Well, apparently, they all do.
That bottom-right photo is from an extended baseball sequence that has almost no bearing on the rest of the film. It goes on for a good ten minutes; we just watch the young campers play against the older ones for a while, just because. Why not. No effect on anything whatsoever. The gentleman in the tight shirt meets an unfortunate end later on, but that’s after he and his buddies hit Angela with a water balloon and draw the wrath of Ricky. By the way, while he and his friends are playing around with water, getting each other wet with a water gun he pulls out of his shorts (I mean…!) he’s dressed like this —
So, here’s the other thing about all of this homoeroticism — I don’t believe it’s entirely unintentional, because the movie is itself playing with gender and sexuality in very specific ways. If you haven’t seen the film, do yourself a favor and watch it. Now. It’s on YouTube, for free. Here! Watch it before reading the rest of this review, which will touch on light spoilers for the end of the film. Or don’t. I’m not the boss of you.
About two-thirds of the way through the movie, Angela goes utterly catatonic while she’s making out with her quasi-boyfriend, which kicks off flashbacks from Angela’s traumatic past. I think this past apparently has something to do with the boating accident from the beginning, but I’m not 100% clear on any of that, so don’t hold me to it. But, at this point, we’re meant to presume that Angela is the little girl who survived the accident at the start of the movie.
What we see in flashback are two kids (Angela and Ricky, we presume, although this is [I think?] later revealed to be a misdirect), peering around the corner, pointing and laughing silently, watching as two men in bed together look deep into each other’s eyes and caress each other’s hair tenderly. I think this is supposed to be shocking and disturbing — note the way the film cuts before they kiss — but really, it’s sort of adorable? You can tell these guys really care about each other.
So, we see that kissing a boy means Angela’s gone catatonic and she’s having PTSD flashbacks to that time she saw two men in love. Then, then! We get this short scene, of the two kids sitting in a bed pointing at each other. Check out this dissolve.
Men sharing a bed?! Boys dissolving into girls?! Could this movie get any more transgressive and shocking?!
…..NSFW spoilers for the end of the film below…
Of course it can. Because, in one of the most famously shocking twist endings of all time, ANGELA is a BOY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!
So, seeing two men in love, and then being raised as a girl by that crazy woman from the beginning of the movie, who’s apparently Angela’s aunt or something, has caused Angela to go completely and utterly batshit insane. Ah, the 80s. A time of rampant homoeroticism, and of the rampant belief that homosexuality causes gender confusion which causes psychopathy. Oops.
It’s tempting to call this movie a whole lot of -phobics and -acists. (Gaycist? Is that a thing?) But Sleepaway Camp defies categorization along modern lines of thinking. It’s pointless to criticize the film, because it’s just so incredibly bizarre. It’s so utterly committed to its specific vision of the world — where 45 year old men wear crop tops and go to summer camp, camp cooks are all pedophiles, and movies should always have more pointlessly, excruciatingly long baseball sequences. Sure, it’s awful. It says terrible things about gay rights and sets all kinds of movements back 50 years, etc. But I have zero confidence that any thought went into the end of this movie, or its implications, beyond “Whoa wouldn’t it be shocking if she was a dude?” The rest of the movie is so uniquely fun to watch that I don’t even care.
