…a good slasher movie doesn't have to be well-acted, believable or suspenseful. It’s quite enough that it keeps you entertained, includes several good, violent set pieces, and leaves you shocked. Robert Hiltzik's Sleepaway Camp is a perfect example of such an effort. It's an exceptionally bad movie but a very good slasher.
—Bartlomiej Paszylk, The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey. McFarland, 2009.
This low-budget 1983 slasher did reasonable box office, received many negative reviews for its derivative plot, and then became something of a cult film. Robert Hiltzik wrote and directed. His career in movies appeared to have ended a few years later. By the 2000s, the film's cult status resulted in his involvement with two sequels. The film has birthed a handful; none have fared especially well. I don't see how they could. This one is a piece of an era, intriguing despite its flaws. It's also forever marked by its twist, something the sequels could not duplicate.
It begins with two prologues.
A camera pans over the empty summer camp in autumn. Voices suggest something has gone seriously wrong.
We flash back eight years earlier, to a dreadful boating accident involving two children, their father, and his same-sex partner, one caused by irresponsible teen campers.
In the present, we learn that only the daughter, Angela (Felissa Rose), survived. She has been adopted by her disturbed Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould) and lives with her cousin, Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten). Martha's sending them off to summer camp. What follows involves a bizarre fusion of Friday the 13th and Meatballs, plausible teen shenanigans juxtaposed with horrific slasher film excesses. Some of these provide disturbing contrast when the killings occur. Others provide the justification. Whereas contemporaneous slashers target teens for their sexual or social transgressions, this one goes straight for the bullies and predators.
Unlike its contemporaries, Sleepaway Camp casts actual teens and tweens, a bold move for an often gruesome R-rated movie. The kids are not consistently the best actors, but they invest the film with believability. They look and behave like kids. Oddball Angela becomes a target of bullying, but she also finds friends and supporters. The film acknowledges and explores the darker sides of adolescence, but it doesn't present every single teen (think Carrie) as complicit in bullying.
Of course, at least one of Angela's supporters is decidedly disturbed. But which one?
The film features uncomfortable elements of the 80s, beyond the camp director (Mike Kellin) constantly smoking in front of kids. Artie (Owen Hughes), the head chef, is a blatant sexual predator. He jokes about his attraction to young girls. The staff simply accept the fact, in that "stay away from Old Man So-and-so"/"he likes'em young" manner of the times. The underage girls whom he targets are less happy about the situation—as are the writer and the audience. Artie's the first to go, his demise among the most horrific and violent in a horrific and violent movie.
Others will follow.
The movie grows less plausible as the plot develops, beyond the killer's genre-based ability to move about and murder so effectively in a small summer camp. Kids face surprisingly few consequences from authority figures for extremely bad behaviour, actions that exceed what would have been tolerated as youthful hijinks and pranks. And it beggars belief that the camp would remain open after so many disturbing deaths. The only concession to reality here are some medical people who arrive on the scene and the cigar-chomping camp director's lament that so many of the campers have fled for their homes. No one thinks to call the police until the last ten minutes.
Acting is uneven. Some of the leads do very well. Felissa Rose, thirteen when she landed the role of Angela, gives a memorable performance. She would appear a few more times on screen before following other pursuits. With Sleepaway Camp's rediscovery in this century, she has found regular work, mostly in low-budget horror. Karen Fields as mean girl Judy plays like a lesser actor in a small town school show. Desiree Gould performs deranged Aunt Martha in a stylized manner that suggests she wandered in from an entirely different film, perhaps by John Waters. Paul DeAngelo as sympathetic, athletic camp counsellor Ronnie has sincerity and a Charles Atlas build but his acting is laughably stilted.
The film reveals its $350,000 budget in ways other than often mediocre (or even bad) acting. They shot at an actual summer camp in September and early October. In many scenes, it's clear from the trees that summer has passed. I exclude the most obvious example here, the opening scene; that takes place after the events of the film.
Much of the discussion of the film, then and now, involves the obligatory twist ending. Any attempt to Google the film now will spoil that ending. If you’re going to watch it, perhaps do so before reading further, here or elsewhere.
SPOILER: The Controversies.
The film features some brief period homophobia, sure, but that would be most kids in the eighties. As for the notion that the twist involves transphobia: I am not convinced. Peter didn't identify as female. He is not trans. His crazy aunt wanted a girl and forced a traumatized and injured male into a female identity with which he was neither comfortable nor suited. In other words, part of Angela's disturbed nature was being raised in a gender identity contrary to how he felt. Viewed that way, the film touches upon a trans-positive argument. How much of this controversy the filmmakers considered is anyone's guess. Controversy also surrounds the final reveal, shadowy full-frontal nudity involving, ostensibly, a minor. The scene actually employs an older male body double who wears a realistic cast of the relevant actress's face, pulled into a horrible open-jawed grimace. The finale freezes that visual on the screen and in the brains of everyone who has ever watched Sleepaway Camp.
Live Deliciously: The 2024 Halloween Horrorquest