Census Bloodbath: I'm A Happy Camper

Year: 1989

Director: Michael A. Simpson

Cast: Pamela Springsteen, Tracy Griffith, Michael J. Pollard

Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As you may recall, I enjoyed Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers, but only reluctantly given how it skated by on a bare bones, unembellished recitation of the slasher formula. Considering that that movie and its sequel were both filmed in the same six week period on the same sets with the same crew and lead actress, it’s truly mind-boggling how much of a vast improvement Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland turns out to be. I guess practice makes perfect, even if that practice is merely the first three weeks of what must have been a pretty fun shoot.

Except for those poor people who had to clean up a month’s worth of Karo syrup.

Like all good slashers, Sleepaway Camp III opens with a murder. Everyone’s favorite wickedly peppy camper killer Angela (Pamela Springsteen) murders and takes the place of Maria (Kashina Kessler), who was on her way to Camp New Horizons. An “experiment in sharing” that will pair underprivileged inner-city youths with rich kids from around the country, New Horizons was opened on the site of the Camp Rolling Hills massacre that took place a year (AKA three weeks) prior. The camp is owned by a couple named after The Munsters – the lascivious Herman (Michael J. Pollard of American Gothic, but also Bonnie and Clyde!) and the lazy Lilly (Sandra Dorsey) – who ostensibly want to bring two cultures together but are quite transparently scamming government funds to go on a tropical vacation.

Let’s not pretend there’s any more “plot” to get through and Meet the Meat, because there’s a hell of a lot of them. Representing the inner cities are: Tony (Mark Oliver, who played “Boss,” in The Boss, so I guess he’s technically the title character?), a profoundly sexy Latino from East L.A.; A-rab (Jill Terashita of Night of the Demons), a profoundly sexy leather-clad punk girl; Snowboy (Kyle Holman), a bottle blonde douchebag who’s so addicted to graffiti that he spray paints everything that isn’t nailed down – and everything that is; and Riff (Daryl Wilcher), who’s obsessed with rap music, insofar as this movie’s idea of “rap” is “license-free synth instrumentals with light scatting.”

And on the rich snobs side we have: Marcia (Tracy Griffith, Melanie Griffith’s half-sister and the third consecutive celebrity sibling to have a prominent role in this franchise), who is so thoroughly bland she has to be the Final Girl, though she has a genuinely sweet romance with Tony; Bobby (Haynes Brooke), a sweetly nerdy Judge Reinhold type who’s always up for a little bondage play; Cindy (Kim Wall), a mousy girl whose shyness hides a deep well of seething racism; and Jan (Stacie Lambert), the obligatory hot girl who inexplicably wants to sleep with the gross camp owner.

And that’s the ABRIDGED list!

You may have noted that the rich kids are named after the Brady Bunch and the poor kids were named after West Side Story. This is either because the screenwriter simply didn’t know as many names as this massive platter of Meat received, or he wanted to engage your brain in some way other than the plot, because that certainly wasn’t gonna do it. Here’s all 80 minutes in a nutshell: the campers play trust games, then Angela kills them. Bada bing, bada bom. Oh, and one of the counselors is officer Barney (Cliff Brand), the father of Hot Sean (a camper who was murdered in the previous film – what a rich mythology we’re building here).

The only thing notably about the kills-only plot is that it’s much more structurally dynamic than the episodic slashings of Unhappy Campers. Our meat is divided into three digestible groups of five that Angela splits her time between in what amounts to a series of vignettes. This gives us time to familiarize ourselves with the characters and their one distinguishing trait before their untimely demise. It’s not rocket science, but the flow is smooth as butter and the interpersonal conflicts stand out clearer among the din.

Perhaps something as simple as a comprehensible structure is a small compliment to pay to a film, but when you’re grading on the scale of Unhappy Campers, this is a skyscraping leap in quality. But that’s not the only improvement Teenage Wasteland has to offer. The post-Freddy quips awkwardly shoehorned into Angela’s mouth are likewise much sharper and clearer. This time they’re actually relevant to some element of the character or the kill (probably because we actually have a sense of who any of these people are), and one or two actually made me laugh out loud (although the best line comes from Marcia in her closing scene, when she delivers a stupendously well-timed joke), which not even Freddy can do most of the time.

Angela is ready for prime time!

The kills here are also delightful. They’re not necessarily an improvement, and there’s no gore gag so epically memorable as Sean’s papier-mâché beheading, but they’re again more appropriate to the characters and setting. The preposterous kills are what propel both movies into to the lower tier of the slasher pantheon, but Teenage Wasteland’s grace notes (like Angela roasting marshmallows over a camper’s burning corpse) propel it forward just a smidge more.

Really, the refrain I’m noticing here is that Teenage Wasteland is actually consistent. That doesn’t make it a great film or even a particularly good one (never forget how poorly lit and staged these movies are), but if Unhappy Campers was raw and unpretentious enough to earn respect from hardcore slasher fans, then Teenage Wasteland surpasses that mark by actually giving a crap. Both are unusually watchable for direct-to-video horror, but Part III - as much as the story behind its production should make this impossible - has learned from the failures of its predecessor to deliver a satisfying chunk of gooey 80’s cheese.

Killer: Angela Baker (Pamela Springsteen)

Final Girl: Marcia (Tracy Griffith)

Best Kill: The “firecracker in the nose” gag is one of the greats, even if the special effects aren’t quite up to the challenge.

Sign of the Times: Angela delivers Riff a tape containing a rap about how she’s going to murder him.

Scariest Moment: Any scene with Herman will give you serious Hard Candy vibes.

Weirdest Moment: Angela delivers Riff a tape containing a rap about how she’s going to murder him.

Champion Dialogue: “Good thing you’re dead, cuz in a couple of years your breasts would’ve been sagging something terrible.”

Body Count: 16

1. Maria is run over by a garbage truck.
2. Tawny snorts cleaning powder.
3. Herman has a stick stabbed through his mouth.
4. Jan is beat to death with a stick.
5. Peter has a firecracker lit in his nose.
6. Snowboy is hit in the head with a log.
7. A-rab is decapitated with an axe.
8. Cindy is dropped from a flagpole
9. Lilly has her head run over by a lawnmower.
10. Bobby is crushed against a tree by ropes.
11. Riff has tent spikes hammered into him.
12. Officer Barney is shot to death.
13. Greg and
14. Anita are axed simultaneously in a Home Alone-esque trap.
15. Paramedic is stabbed with a hypodermic needle.
16. Cop is stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle.

TL;DR: Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland is an inexplicable improvement on its relentlessly average predecessor.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1233
Reviews In This Series
Sleepaway Camp (Hiltzik, 1983)
Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (Simpson, 1988)
Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (Simpson, 1989)

Census Bloodbath: Happy Fearth of July!

Year: 1988

Director: John Hough

Cast: Yvonne DeCarlo, Rod Steiger, Sarah Torgov

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Again we wade into that strange holiday netherworld in which I watch a festivity-appropriate movie on the day of, but don't get a chance to review it until a day later. So I apologize for not reviewing my Fourth of July pick, 1988's American Gothic, until today, but believe me it's worth the wait.

Since we haven't really talked about the climate of 1988 in detail yet, let me paint you a picture. By the end of the decade, the slasher genre was a grotesque and decadent monstrosity lumbering across the plains of cinema. After the advent of home video, DTV slashers had inundated the market, overwatering the already twisted root that was the subgenre.

If you picked any slasher film from the year at random, you would likely find a bloated franchise picture (Friday the 13th Part VII, Halloween 4, Sleepaway Camp II, etc.), a post-Nightmare supernatural twist on the tropes (Bad Dreams, Deadly Dreams, Ghosthouse), or one of a few DTV stragglers that held on to the traditional slice and dice ways with an iron grip (Death Nurse 2, The Last Slumber Party, Amsterdamned).

At this point, it was a genre set in stone with an increasingly bloodthirsty MPAA slashing out gory scenes left and right. Without the appeal of being a shiny new genre or shocking the audience with bloody kills, desperate slashers were grabbing at straws, eager to find anything twisted and exciting to make a quick buck. Usually these films crashed and burned, but American Gothic is a special little monster that almost certainly deserves more attention than it gets.

OK, maybe not that much attention.

The story goes as such. A group of friends traveling to an island in the Pacific Northwest has their propellor plane break down halfway there. They make an emergency landing on nearby shore and decide that an island is an island, so they can camp here until they repair their plane.

The Meat in this film is an exceptionally uninteresting crop, save for one standout, but when something stands out in this movie, it stands the hell out. First there's your usual crop of clichés like Paul (Stephen Shellen, also in The Stepfather), the cute man with glasses who is offscreen for a good two thirds of the film; Lynn (Fiona Hutchison), this film's nomination for Most Slappable Douchebag;  Terri (Caroline Barclay), a terrible actress and scuba diving enthusiast; Rob (Mark Lindsay Chapman), a handsome and playful young man unfortunately saddled with the worst mullet in human history; Jeff (Mark Erickson) an annoying blonde with a Jew Fro and a pilot's license; and Cynthia (Sarah Torgov), his wife and purveyor of that interest I was referring to earlier.

You see, Cynthia has agreed to go on this trip in order to get over the accidental drowning of her child, the trauma of which led her to be institutionalized. The movie begins with her release, opening on a shot of her trapped behind bars.

It's a metaphor, see?

When the group goes exploring, they discover a large home full of 50-year-old toys and furniture. Instead of running away immediately, they play dress-up with clothes from a wardrobe and dance the Charleston because trespassing is OK as long as it's on an island. Needless to say, when the elderly homeowners return, they're none too pleased, although they do invite the youngsters to stay for the night.

At first Ma (Yvonne DeCarlo, also of Silent Scream) and Pa (Rod Steiger), as they prefer to be called, seem just a wee bit eccentric (their religious fervor shows just a tad too strongly and they won't let anybody near the basement door), but once their three children begin to appear from out of the woodwork (it takes literally several days for all three of them to make their presence known), the travelers grow suspicious.

You see, these kids are actually middle aged men and women who act and dress like they're 12 years old. Fanny (Janet Wright), Woody (Michael J. Pollard, also of Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland), and Teddy (William Hootkins) seem to believe wholeheartedly not only that they're young and hearty, but that it is the 1920's and the era of President Woodrow Wilson.

This is mighty unsettling, but the best of the three actors is Wright, who captures a sort of Umbridge-esque menace while at the same time 100% accurately portraying the simple emotions and responses that an 11-year-old girl would have to her environment.

Needless to say, the family begins to bump off the group one by one because they perceive them to be sinners. This idea isn't helped by many of the members' utterly oblivious smoking, swearing, and sexing. I know this is the way of the slasher world - you drink, you screw, you die - but never has the way to avoid meeting a grisly end seemed so obvious from the get-go.

Maybe don't willingly piss off people insane enough to wear these outfits.

Before we go on, let's get one thing straight. American Gothic is a poorly made film, but not as bereft of artistry as the typical genre entries this late into the decade tended to be. Sure, maybe the boom mike totally eclipses a quarter of the frame in an early shot. Sure, maybe the ancient house looks freshly painted and underpopulated like the production designer constructed it that day and bought whatever he could find for fifty bucks at a thrift shop.

There's little to no gore in the film thanks to the dictatorial rule of the MPAA but somehow, miraculously, the filmmakers took what they had and turned it into a near masterpiece of bonkers B-cinema. The kills are clever and compensate with humor and tension instead of gore (Rob is swung over a cliff via swingset, a long-forgotten Paul turns up dead at the worst possible moment). And despite the limitations of the budget, American Gothic manages to ramp up the creep factor more than any other slasher in the tail end of the decade.

Sure, it's in a campy register. But if you combine the fun of the kills and the totally bizarre characterizations of the killers along with the surprisingly resonant thematic through line provided by Cynthia as she navigates this world of long-preserved children while coping with the loss of her own, the movie transcends everything and becomes startlingly capable. One memorable scene with a mummified infant corpse still manages to be utterly chilling despite the fact that it looks like an alien sculpture made of raisins. 

And if you show me a person who says they don't find this even slightly unsettling, I'll show you a liar.

This goes on for about an hour, at which point the film just gives up and launches into an entirely new storyline. It feels like the sequel to this film was tacked onto its final thirty minutes. It constantly goes places you never expected it to go and defies any and all expectations, all while maintaining its status as a tacky and silly slasher film.

I won't spoil this half, so lunacy-filled as it is, because I'd rather have everybody experience it on their own terms. But let me just say the final shot actually proves that there was at least a smidgen of talent behind the camera and reminds one of The Descent in a mystifyingly positive way.

This film is a terrific story of a family trapped in time wrapped with a slasher bow and I thought it was great fun. It's not truly scary and it won't be getting on anybody's top ten lists unless you pare it down to the most specific of subsets, but American Gothic will certainly become a new classic in the Brennan household.

Killer: Ma (Yvonne DeCarlo), Pa (Rod Steiger), and their Brood (Janet Wright, Michael J. Pollard, William Hootkins)

Final Girl: Cynthia (Sarah Torgov)

Best Kill: They're all lovely, but I'm rather partial to Rob getting swung over a cliff, to which nobody really has any reaction.

Sign of the Times: Aside from Rob's mullet, he listens to that instrumental (copyright-free) 80's rock that all slasher kids seem to be so into.

Scariest Moment: Fanny asks Cynthia to kiss her baby good night.

Weirdest Moment: Take your pick, this is a deeply weird movie. But I'm personally in favor of when Rob tries to get everybody to dance by shouting "C'mon, gang!" at them repeatedly like he's in a 60's sitcom.

Champion Dialogue: "Don't you wanna be in the clean plate club?"

Body Count: 10; 5 vacationers and 5 killers

1. Rob is tossed over a cliff via swingset.
2. Lynn is hung with a jumprope.
3. Jeff is stabbed in the eye with a toy soldier's bayonet.
4. Paul is axed in the face offscreen.
5. Terri has her neck snapped.
6. Fanny is beaten to death with a tin bathtub.
7. Woody is stabbed with a toy soldier's bayonet.
8. Ma is stabbed with knitting needles.
9. Teddy is stabbed in the neck with a scythe.
10. Pa is shot in the chest with a shotgun. 

TL;DR: American Gothic is a fascinating curio and worth more attention than it gets.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1544