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: Angela's Ashes

Year: 1988

Director: Michael A. Simpson

Cast: Pamela Springsteen, Renée Estevez, Tony Higgins 

Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Sleepaway Camp franchise is a testament to how resilient the 80’s slasher formula truly was. In the face of moral and artistic protest, a strict MPAA crackdown, and declining box office, even a low-profile cheapie from five years prior could bear fruit. The blood squeezed out of the stone that was the delightfully off-kilter Sleepaway Camp came in the form of two direct-to-video knockoffs, shot back-to-back on the same set and released in subsequent years. The first of these belated sequels, released in the declining days of the slasher boom, is Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers.

Now, I want you to keep this in mind. Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers is not very good at all. But such is the cognitive dissonance of the slasher fan that it is one of the more well-respected examples of the form in the artistically bankrupt year that was 1988. As much as I too find it entirely entertaining, take any recommendation with a grain of salt. When you’re buffeted with the likes of The Last Slumber Party and Death Nurse 2 day in and day out, pretty much anything is going to feel like an oasis.

You can put that blurb on the poster.

In Sleepaway Camp II, we find ourselves in the bucolic Camp Rolling Hills deep in the New Jersey woods. Over the campfire, a bloodcurdling tale is told about the murders at the nearby Camp Arawak. Five years ago, one of the campers went psychotic, killing “over 30 people,” which in no way gels with even the most generous of body counts for the original film. The killer is still at large. Now if only they could remember her name…

Story time is suddenly interrupted by the relentlessly peppy counselor Angela (Pamela Springsteen, the most famous Springsteen if you only watch horror movies and don’t ever listen to music or talk to my dad), who it quickly becomes clear is the very same deranged killer: Angela is hell-bent on making sure her campers follow the rules. Those without the requisite amount of pep are given the axe… right in the face. Everything about this flies directly in the face of Angela as we knew her back in 1983, and with a tossed-off expository line removes the single most interesting element of her character, but Bruce Springsteen’s sister delivering terribly anti-witty quips that would make Freddy Krueger cringe is better than nothing.

Here are the campers who are under threat of being “sent home” by Angela: Molly (Renée Estevez of Intruder), who is clearly our Final Girl because she’s the one who says “guys, I really don’t think we should be doing this…”; Sean (Tony Higgins), her beefy love interest who appears to be in some sort of Jack situation because he looks at least 25 year old; Ally (Valerie Hartman, who returns for Sleepaway Camp III holding the coveted position of “raccoon wrangler”), the obligatory Slut character who is so sexually aggressive it’s a surprise the camp is still standing; and a whole slate of anonymous characters played by even more anonymous actors. These characters are given names like Judd, Emilio, Anthony, and so forth.

Geddit?

The defining feature of Sleepaway Camp II is rather the lack of a feature: there is no plot. It’s just a handful of slasher tropes scooped into a garbage bag, which is shaken periodically and dumped out in a new order every 10 minutes or so. Fortunately, the deaths come at a steady enough clip and the run time generously caps it all at around 76 minutes, so nothing stays onscreen long enough to get tiresome.

For all its bareness, Sleepaway Camp II really strips the slasher genre down to its core elements, and it’s rather charming for it. Don’t get me wrong, almost everything in it is impossibly lame: The kills are cheaply constructed. The dialogue attempts to be funny but constantly arrives at hopeless non-quips like “say no to drugs.” And the acting isn’t execrable, but it’s pretty vanilla, with the exception of Pamela Springsteen, who takes home both Best and Worst in Show (her performance is shrill and one-note, but her facial structure has an uncanny ability to shift from chipmunk-cheeked cheer to angular menace, and that’s nothing to thumb one’s pointy nose at.)

But! There’s something genial and compelling about its total lack of pretense. The filler scenes with the campers showcase some fun, unforced character dynamics that breathe life into the campground setting. And the murders, while scarcely as outré as the best of the late 80’s weirdo slashers, have a bare minimum of creativity and a random grab-bag sensibility that make them unpredictable and sometimes even a  teensy bit nasty.

You’ve been a naughty girl, Angela.

There’s something genuine and honest about a film that’s trying so little to impress, and thus most of the badness swings around the horn to become positive qualities. There’s only one unequivocally awful sequence, in which Angela has a “nightmare” that’s just a blue-tinted assemblage of flashback footage slowed down to an excruciating crawl. Now that is indefensible, but although two minutes of filler is admittedly a rather large percentage of 76, it’s still not enough to turn me against the film.

I in no way endorse this kind of lazy filmmaking, but I can’t change what’s already been done. And as it stands, Sleepaway Camp II is a lark I don’t mind pursuing every now and again. Its inextricable link with its simultaneously-produced sequel (more on that next time) makes it a bit of a unique curio, but standing on its own merits it’s a totally acceptable way to while away an hour and change. Also Sean is pretty. Let's take a quick peek before we go.

Killer: Angela Johnson née Baker (Pamela Springsteen)

Final Girl: Molly (Renee Estevez)

Best Kill: Angela tests out a variety of objects in the cabin to assess their murderous capabilities before deciding on a guitar string to garrote Demi.

Sign of the Times: The music playing on the boom box in the mess hall sounds like the soundtrack to Chopping Mall.

Scariest Moment: Sean and molly discover Angela’s secret cabin full of bodies.

Weirdest Moment: One of the female characters seems to think that flashing her boobs is a hilarious punch line to every joke she makes.

Champion Dialogue: “Too bad they haven’t figured out a way to make French fries nutritious. I’m a  nut when it comes to French fries!”

Body Count: 18

1. Phoebe (not Cates) is hit in the head with a log.
2. Jodi (not Foster) is barbecued.
3. Brooke (not Shields) is barbecued.
4. Mare (not Winningham) is drilled.
5. Anthony (not Michael Hall) has his throat slashed with a Freddy glove.
6. Judd (not Nelson) is chainsawed.
7. Ally (not Sheedy) is drowned in an outhouse.
8. Demi (not Moore) is garroted with a guitar string.
9. Lea (not Thompson) is stabbed in the heart.
10. TC (not Tom Cruise) has battery acid thrown in his face.
11. Sean (not Penn) is decapitated.
12. Ralph (not Macchio) has his throat cut.
13. Charlie (not Sheen) is killed offscreen.
14. Emilio (not Estevez) is killed offscreen.
15. Uncle John (not Hughes) is killed offscreen.
16. Diane (not Lane) is stabbed in the gut.
17. Rob (not Lowe) is hanged.
18. Truck Lady (not anyone) is stabbed repeatedly.

TL;DR: Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers, for no reason I can properly discern, is a reasonably delightful if thoroughly generic example of the slasher form.

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1259
Reviews In This Series
Sleepaway Camp (Hiltzik, 1983)
Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (Simpson, 1988)
Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (Simpson, 1989)

Census Bloodbath: The Lady And The Camp

For our Scream 101 episode about this very film, click here.

Year: 1983

Director: Robert Hiltzik

Cast: Felissa Rose, Jonathan Tiersten, Karen Fields

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

1983 was a real weird year for the slasher genre. It was the only year that didn’t feature an appearance from the decade’s three biggest boogeymen. Freddy, Michael, and Jason all gave the year a pass, and not even odd-timing stalwart Leatherface revved his bloody chainsaw. The wholly unrelated Halloween III: Season of the Witch didn’t even land in this year, the most sparsely populated of the slasher golden era. The barest blips of franchise action arrived in the form of Boogeyman II (which is about 50% reconstituted footage from the original, so it hardly counts) and the much-belated homecoming of Norman Bates, Psycho II.

Also, although the year had some truly great moments, only one film earned itself a sequel. The franchise fairy must have been taking a smoke break that year. But let’s take a look at that particular, peculiar entry, which in fact collected two late 80’s DTV sequels, a half-finished fourth entry, and a decades-later resurrection: Sleepaway Camp. While we’re taking a look, let’s ask ourselves one question. Of all the 1983 slasher ventures, did this one above all deserve the sequel hoopla it got?

Short answer: Yes.

Following a boating accident that killed her father and sibling, Angela (Felissa Rose) lives with her cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) and her Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould) a sublimely cartoonish dowager. The kids leave to spend the summer at Camp Arawak, where Angela’s habit of never speaking a word and watching activities from the sidelines draws the ire of campground bullies, a wicked counselor, and a sleazy pedophile chef. Her only companions are the fiercely protective Ricky and his friend Paul (Christopher Collet) with whom she develops a sweet infatuation.

When the people who torment Angela wind up dead under increasingly unusual circumstances, even the bad publicity-averse camp owner Mel (Mike Kellin) can see that something truly despicable is going on. But is it Angela offing the bullies or Ricky? Or is it someone else entirely?

Maybe one of the 30-year-old campers, perchance?

The truly surprising thing about Sleepaway Camp (which confounded me on the first viewing as a young Johnny Slasherfan) is that, as much as its title and poster scream that it’s a blatant rip-off of Friday the 13th, it’s patently not that. For one thing, kids’ heads are actually on the chopping block as opposed to merely of-age counselors. But when you boil it down, the only thing Sleepaway Camp has in common with Friday the 13th is its setting, and that’s kind of a given. It’s practically goreless (although with the state of the MPAA in 1983, that was hardly unusual), but it’s also a psychotically sexual journey through the sleazy, queer underbelly of 80’s cinema. If a John Waters film ate a Pedro Almodóvar movie and pooped it out, that would be Sleepaway Camp.

It’s not a well-made motion picture by any stretch of the imagination, but it double dips in 80’s cheese to make up for that fact. Every male character wears cutoffs shorts so tight you can not only see his religion, you can check for tattoos. And when they run out of fabric to chop off the shorts, they move on up to the shirts. The men of this movie make Johnny Depp’s Nightmare on Elm Street crop top look like a dress. And then you have the army of female vamps stalking their way through the film, including Karen Fields’ Judy (who is driven mad by puberty, destroying Godzilla-like anything that obstructs her path to male attention) and Katherine Kamhi’s Meg (a counselor who might be the actual devil).

But even those choice cuts can’t compare to the top shelf prime sirloin of Desiree Gould as Aunt Martha. An electromagnetically compelling screen presence, she perfectly embodies the flat-out insanity of the movie’s best moments. Rapidly alternating between shouting her lines at the stop of her lungs and quietly murmuring to herself, she is thoroughly unpredictable, a nuclear power cell of bad movie magic. She’s like that crazy aunt we all have that shows up for Thanksgiving rolling on molly.

No? Just me?

And to be fair, there are a handful of genuinely good sequences that indicate the presence of a focused, if deranged personality behind the camera. A twirling flashback in an inky void and the razor-sharp sound design of the closing scene are both bone-chilling sequences that boggle the mind, but the single best scene might be the opening credits. As the camera pans over different areas of the empty camp the sound of kids at play blasts over the soundtrack. It creates an exquisitely foreboding atmosphere, reminding you that the lease on Camp Arawak’s summer fun hath all too short a date.

Plus, although the kills are almost entirely offscreen, their use of silhouettes and alternative framing provided a stylized approach that’s, if anything, even more effective. These kills are brutal in practice (drowning, bee stings, curling iron penetration) and they are mercilessly perpetrated on children. By keeping things offscreen, the film avoids being ickier than it already is, and the clawed kabuki hands that indicate death are a startlingly Rashômon-esque touch.

Then there’s the rich vein of queer undertones that powers the film’s every move. People tend to focus on [SPOILERS the reveal that Angela is actually a boy. This is transphobic and sleazy in a way that only the 80’s and early 90’s would allow, but it’s also a nauseatingly surreal moment (accompanied by an inhuman screech) that transcends politics to enter the pantheon of great horror moments).] However, there’s so much more to tap into about parental sexuality, identity formation, and societal pressure that’s present throughout the entire film.

There’s so much there in Sleepaway Camp that a little thing like cinematic ineptitude hardly even factors in. The story might be a loose tangle of spaghetti, a ten minute baseball scene might be shameless padding even by the standards of a genre largely concerned with people standing around in the dark, the acting might remind you of the annual ski at the Law and Order Extras convention, and the keening score might strain so hard to force a mood that it gives itself a hernia, but it’s so devastatingly fun that it leaves an everlasting impression. It’s a demented, entirely idiosyncratic slasher film, and in the context of 1983, that’s an incredibly rare and valuable thing.

Killer: Angela (Felissa Rose)

Final Girl: Not Applicable

Best Kill: As much as I hate to disseminate pro-bee propaganda, the kill where a kid is locked in a bathroom stall with a beehive is just ruthless.

Sign of the Times: It would be easier to list the things that aren't dripping with 80’s cheese.

Scariest Moment: Angela seems to be cradling Paul in her lap, but it’s really his severed head.

Weirdest Moment: A totally acceptable camp activity is playing water balloons on the roof.

Champion Dialogue: “She’s a real carpenter’s dream: Flat as a board and needs a screw!”

Body Count: 8; not including 4 nameless campers dismembered with a hatchet offscreen or a pedophile chef who gets a pot of boiling water dumped on him and survives.

1. [Angela 1.0 is killed in a boating accident.]
2. Gay Dad is killed in a boating accident.
3. Kenny is drowned.
4. Billy is stung to death by bees.
5. Meg is stabbed in the back.
6. Judy is impaled with a curling iron.
7. Mel is shot in the neck with an arrow.
8. Paul is decapitated.

TL;DR: Sleepaway Camp is a rollicking, campy good time with a thriving queer undercurrent.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1289
Reviews In This Series
Sleepaway Camp (Hiltzik, 1983)
Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (Simpson, 1988)
Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (Simpson, 1989)