REVIEW: Sleepaway Camp (1973)

Sleepaway Camp sitting on my shelf for about a year now, ever since I picked it up during my crusade to form the world's largest collection of the world's shittiest slasher films. While a noble venture, it ended rather abruptly when I realized that a lot of the world's shittiest slasher films are actually shitty, as opposed to the fun kind of shitty. So, my collection went unheralded, unfinished, and unloved, up until last night when I decided to blow the dust off of my DVD booklet and give this classic a try.

In a bizarre departure from the genre (kind of), Sleepaway Camp does not feature gratuitous female nudity from dozens of nubile 19-year-old camp counselors. Sure, there are counselors around, but the focus of the movie is actually on the summer camp attendees this time, which makes the overt themes of sexuality simultaneously off-putting and revolting. Sure, it has a context and a definite thematic value, but after being weened on films that taught me that all camp-based slasher films must have incredibly hot nude women, it's a little troubling when all the women in this one are thirteen.

Welcome to 1974, when a little boy and a little girl are happily sitting on a tiny boat with their father in the middle of a lake. It's summertime, and the beaches are full with teens, and a lifeguard is taking a girl out for a ride with some water skis. The little boy and girl decide to pull off the prank of pushing their dad into the water, which (of course) capsizes the boat, but all is well. Their dad's friend shouts at them from the beach...but they still don't see that the water-skiing boat is headed directly for them! Before anyone can say "1970s fashion sucks!" the boat slides right through the family, and moments later we see the father's corpse doing a really good version of the dead man's float.

"8 Years Later"

The following is either a great scene or a horrible scene, depending on what you think is "good" versus what you think is "funny." A crazy woman is packing up her two youngins, Ricky and Angela, for a summer at Camp Arawak. Angela isn't actually the woman's daughter; she's (presumably) one of the kids from the opening scene, and the woman is her aunt. Her crazy, crazy aunt. She dresses like she's on her way to Oz, and she speaks like a community theater understudy. I'm not entirely sure what kind of actors the director had to work with, but I can't quite tell if she's supposed to be speaking like a bad actress, or she's just a really bad actress. I guess it depends on the circumstances, but this scene is either deplorable or in some manner sophisticated. I love that kind of apologetic ambiguity in my horror films.

So, off the kids go to Camp Annawanna. (Arawak. Whatever.) It starts off well enough, and Ricky is happy since he's spent other summers there, but Angela is a little different. She's not the bustiest or prettiest of the preteens, although that doesn't stop the pedophiliac chef from bringing her back to the storeroom to show her "something." Luckily, the deviant is interrupted, and hours later gets a vat of boiling water tossed on him. Coincidence? Not in this genre!

Angela, being a little quiet, gets picked on by the other kids, especially Judy the camp slut. In fact, pretty much the only people that don't pick on her are Ricky and his friend Paul, who starts a little camp crush "steady" thing with her. Things are going well, until one of the other campers turns up just shy of alive. After what feels like forever, his death is followed by some of the other nastier campers, and for good measure some campers that seemingly had nothing to do with Angela. Up until this point, we're still not really certain who the killer is; signs point to Angela, but Ricky seems to take the insults to his cousin awfully personally, and he's conveniently never around when the murders take place. I give the movie a measure of credit for not explicitly spelling it out until the very end, because most other movies that play the "Was it them or THEM?" game give it up much earlier. Despite our guesses, we don't really know until the last five minutes or so. And what a last five minutes they are.

This movie, despite being one of the films that really kicked the entire slasher genre into high gear, is incredibly slow. Incredibly incredibly slow. The body count is really low, and they space the suckers out, too. My girlfriend had a ten-minute rule that she instituted about forty-five minutes into the movie, where if someone didn't die at least every ten minutes, she got to turn off the movie -- it's slow enough so that my girlfriend was giving me ultimatums. Luckily, her rule came after the interminably dull and useless baseball scene, which thrilled us with the athletic skills of characters we don't know doing things we don't care about for ten or eleven minutes of screen time. (Although it features the fantastic line: "Eat shit and live, Bill.")

The movie is nothing special, except for the very last scene. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the movie isn't worth watching except for the very last scene. I'm not sure if it actually redeems the movie, but it helps. Spoilers will abound in the next paragraphs, so you can just skip them if you want.


I'll just come right out and say it: Angela isn't the little girl from the opening scene; she's the little boy. He was the only survivor of the accident that killed his father and his sister, and he went to live with the crazy aunt. I'm not sure why she was so messed up, but flashbacks tell us that she didn't want to be raising a second boy along with Ricky, so she somehow warped the fragile, accident-shattered mind of the boy into accepting the new fact that he was a girl. Even worse, there are more flashbacks: we learn that Angela and his sister had caught their father in bed with another man -- the guy that was waiting for them on the beach during the accident. I guess the implication was that this messed up his perception of his own sexuality.

This whole story is so messed up that I can't tell if it's offensive or not. Initially, my first reaction was that the movie was saying that having gay parents will turn children into cross-dressing murderers. Then, I figured that it was really more about the aunt's wackiness that screwed up Angela, and being forced to become a woman. I mean, the movie shows the two men in bed together during the late-game flashback, and it's genuinely portrayed as though it's a really loving relationship; it doesn't show it as something that's negative or naughty or anything. I lean towards thinking that it was just a way to show why Angela might have been attracted to men (although she really didn't seem to be all that attracted to men), since just making her a gay character would have been kind of hard to explain in the context of the story -- easier to have a "well, maybe because of her dad" explanation than also explaining that she just happened to be gay. If she was gay at all, anyway. I mean "he." Maybe the movie was saying that you can make someone trans-gendered by putting them in dresses, which might get back to offensive. Maybe they're saying that kids should get summer jobs instead of wasting their summers at camp.

(Although for twenty bucks you can schedule a live phone call with Felissa Rose, the actress behind Angela, at this here website. Maybe we should call her and ask her what her real motivation was.)

I give up on thinking about this movie.

I'll say one last thing for those of you who don't care about my grad thesis on gender roles in horror films: the last shot in the movie is vastly creepy. That should be enough for those viewers that prefer shallow bloody entertainment.