Reviewing trash movies with any degree of regularity leads one to the employment of a fairly truncated critical sliding scale. Narrow “trash movies” down to 1980s American stalk ‘n’ slash flicks, and the requirements for a positive review pretty much come down to: (a) are there any boring bits?, and (b) is the camera equipment visible in shot? Answer no to both and the motherfucker gets a pass.
And for the most part, the theory works. Watch ‘Friday the 13th’ or ‘The Burning’ or ‘Prom Night’ or ‘Sorority Row’ or ‘Tits-Out Cheerleaders Get Massacred in the Shower Block’ and employ those two questions when writing your review. It’s a failsafe and I’ll probably be following your blog within a week or two.
But there’s always an exception that proves the rule.
Ladies and gentlemen, ‘Sleepaway Camp’. Written and directed by Robert Hiltzik, ‘Sleepaway Camp’ is basically Schroedinger’s slasher: it’s the best and the worst of the genre at one and the same time. How it manages this is entirely down to Hiltzik himself. As writer, he does some brilliant and unexpected things with the material. As director, he’s borderline incompetent.
It seems unfair to bash ‘Sleepaway Camp’ for not being particularly interesting to look at – it was made for a pittance, and none of its contemporaries have any real production values to speak of – but I’d be outright shocked if I came across another film of its ilk as visually uninteresting as this one. Hiltzik is incapable of making a summer camp, with its lake and woods and proliferation of buildings, seem in shape or form like a unified locale. Shots are placed next to each rather than the film actually being edited. Entire scenes idle past without any internal dynamic; any sense of rhythm. Performances range from terrible to just-about-functional.
Again, you’re probably mentally enumerating any number of slashers that feature poor acting, badly constructed set pieces and shoddy cinematography and wondering why I’m singling out ‘Sleepaway Camp’ for special critical treatment, but I really can’t stress enough how singularly unengaging it is as a viewing experience. Emphasis on “viewing experience”. Because Hiltzik’s actual script is quite an unusual and noteworthy piece of work.
Most slashers set at a summer camp or retreat follow a simple narrative model: a group of good looking but expendable kids are whittled down until the final girl puts the run-around on the killer in the final act, with the hour or so of screen time not given over to gory kill scenes functioning on the level of ‘Porky’s’-style lowbrow sexploitation. You know the drill: skinny-dipping, shower scenes, shagging in the woods. ‘Sleepaway Camp’ does things differently. Hiltzik’s script posits the summer camp or retreat as a place of existential awfulness and takes pains to make his depiction of it as abjectly depressing as, say, Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Winter Light’.
A prologue has prepubescent siblings Peter and Angela bereaved of their father after a boating accident. Years later, Angela (Felissa Rose) is living with her eccentric aunt Martha (Desiree Gould, whose performance has to be seen to be disbelieved) and much-put-upon cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten). The flamboyant but self-centred Martha packs the two of them off to Camp Arawak. Angela has zero enthusiasm at the prospect, while Ricky looks forward to hooking up with Judy (Karen Fields), a girl he schmoozed with at camp the previous year.
Arawak quickly reveals itself as some kind of nexus point for all the shittiness of the universe. Judy spurns Ricky, more interested in flirting with bad boys Kenny (John E Dunn) and Mike (Tom Van Dell), or joining forces with bitch queen gal pal Meg (Katherine Kamhi) to bully Angela. Kenny and Mike take an immediate dislike to Ricky and his buddy Paul (Christopher Collet). Ricky and Paul’s unified front is tested when Paul takes a shine to Angela. Meanwhile, Angela withdraws into herself, to the consternation of sympathetic camp counsellors Susie (Susan Glaze) and Ronnie (Paul DeAngelo). Efforts to bring Angela out of her shell are compromised when head chef Artie (Owen Hughes) attempts to molest her.
Artie’s sudden death shortly afterwards – vociferously deemed an accident by grouchy camp owner Mel (Mike Kellin) – sets the tone. Any number of fatalities ensue, and all of them proceed from some offence against Angela. The script posits the killer as either Angela or Ricky in such self-evident style that I became convinced Hiltzik was going all out to smokescreen a last-minute twist that it was someone else entirely. And, yes, Hiltzik does have a twist up his sleeve – and it’s a zinger – but the nature of it is … well, this is where reviewing ‘Sleepaway Camp’ becomes problematic.
It’s not that well-known a franchise – there were two direct sequels, then a ‘Return to ~’ that tried to pretend parts two and three didn’t happen and picked up straight after the original, as well as a supposed canonical part four, the filming for which was never completed but which was belatedly released in a version padded out with clips from the earlier films – certainly not when compared with the ‘Friday the 13th’, ‘Halloween’ and ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ sagas, and has never really broken cover beyond its cult following. So I don’t want to go into the mechanics of its twist ending, which is as genuinely effective a twist as you’re likely to come across, nor would it be fair to consider the sneakily effective ways Hiltzik elides it for so much of the running time.
But the thematic implications of the twist are something else. Yes, it was made in 1983 and attitudes were different then. And the very nature of the slasher film (name just one that isn’t, at the very least, sexist and voyeuristic) is an exercise in political incorrectness. But ‘Sleepaway Camp’ takes its unreconstructed thinking to new levels. Again, there’s little I can say without giving far too much way, but at least two expressions that end in ‘-phobic’ apply.
So: ‘Sleepaway Camp’ – grim, joyless, jaw-droppingly insensitive in its final moments, and the whole thing parcelled up at a technical level that could almost count as anti-film-making. And yet, for the connoisseur of the genre, or at least the exploitation fan looking for something a tad off-base, curiously – indeed, very very cautiously – recommended.
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