Sleepaway Camp (1983)
Starring: Mike Kellin, Jonathan Tierston, Felissa Rose, Christopher Collet
Director: Robert Hiltzik
Synopsis: Delicious, totally deranged and sexually twisted plot of kiddie serial killers. Insane!
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

"weak-kneed..without flair or gore" Creature Features

 "raw, violent and pointless" Blockbuster Video

 "very perverse" Splatter Movies

 

Ultra-cheap stalker-slasher-whodunnit with a plotline as utterly deranged as they come. In today's politically correct climate, it is highly unlikely that a film featuring serial murder, sexually confused children and some spectacularly inappropriate adult behaviour would ever receive a mainstream release. Add to that scenes of a child being mercilessly beaten by an elderly guardian and two youngsters stumbling upon what can only be described as rather unconventional bedroom activities, and it becomes even more remarkable that Sleepaway Camp ever found its way into cinemas.

The film opens with a horrific boating accident that leaves Daddy hideously mangled. Eight years later, the surviving children have grown into a boisterous teenage brat and his shy, mute cousin Angela, now living under the watchful eye of the mysterious Aunt Martha, a woman who looks distinctly masculine—and oddly familiar.

The youngsters are dispatched to Camp Arawak, where they join the usual assortment of awkward teenagers, raging hormones and summer-camp clichés. If the children appear somewhat disturbed, however, just wait until the adults arrive.

There is the lecherous cook with an unhealthy interest in the "fresh chicken", a spectacularly dim-witted janitor, a camp owner who spends more time admiring his female counsellors than supervising his campers, and a pair of athletic instructors who appear to possess muscles of impressive proportions but brains scarcely larger than peanuts. None of them could act their way out of a paper bag.

The central story revolves around the mysterious Angela, her loud but ultimately good-hearted cousin Ricky, Angela's budding romance and the resident camp siren Judy, whose level of maturity seems to have bypassed the rest of the cast by several years.

As the usual summer-camp rivalries and teenage soap opera unfold, bodies begin accumulating with pleasing regularity. Victims meet increasingly bizarre and often ingenious ends. The child-molesting cook, for example, receives a particularly satisfying dose of poetic justice by ending up cooked in his own enormous vat. Quite what he was preparing in there remains one of the film's great mysteries.

Most of the murders occur off-screen, with director Robert Hiltzik wisely relying on anticipation rather than explicit violence. Instead, the audience is treated to lingering close-ups of the aftermath, showcasing elaborate make-up effects that range from impressively gruesome to gloriously over-the-top. One suspects a sizeable proportion of the production budget disappeared into buckets of fake blood and prosthetic appliances.

The film rattles along at an entertaining pace until finally arriving at one of the most unforgettable endings in horror cinema. Whether one admires it, laughs at it or simply stares at the screen in complete disbelief, it is a climax that is almost impossible to forget.

Angela has deservedly become one of cult horror's most memorable characters. Then again, virtually everyone in Sleepaway Camp qualifies as some variety of eccentric, pervert or outright lunatic. Remarkably, despite dreadful acting, threadbare production values and dialogue that frequently borders on the surreal, the film somehow works.

There is an infectious sincerity about the whole enterprise. It never feels cynical. Beneath the outrageous plotting lies an undeniable enthusiasm that elevates it well above much of the disposable slasher fodder produced during the 1980s.

Sleepaway Camp is gloriously tongue-in-cheek, gleefully camp and populated by characters who seem to have escaped from another dimension altogether. It emerges as one of the genuine triumphs of low-budget Z-grade horror: a film capable of making audiences simultaneously wince at its grisly make-up effects and laugh aloud at its astonishing dialogue, bizarre performances and increasingly unhinged narrative.

Just when you imagine proceedings cannot possibly become any stranger, the end credits arrive accompanied by Frankie Vinci's unforgettable "Angela's Theme (You're Just What I've Been Looking For)." It is one of the most magnificently awful songs ever attached to a horror film, performed with such tortured sincerity that the singer sounds as though he is in considerable physical discomfort throughout.

For all its faults—and there are many—Sleepaway Camp has earned its place among the great cult curiosities of 1980s horror. Insane, amateurish, deeply weird and thoroughly entertaining, it remains essential viewing for devotees of horror, exploitation cinema and unapologetic cinematic schlock.

Not to be missed.