Sleepaway Camp (1983)
director: | Robert Hiltzik |
release-year: | 1983 |
genres: | horror, slasher |
countries: | USA |
languages: | English |
Some teenagers are out water skiing and accidentally run over the neighbor and his little son and daughter. Only the daughter, Angela, survives, now wide-eyed and mute from trauma. She's sent to summer camp with her cousin, whose mom acts like a weird cyborg. It seems like some sort of comedy gag, but I don't get the joke. Everyone has a thick New York accent.

She is immediately preyed upon by the pedophile camp chef, and escapes just in time. Soon after, pedo-chef is shoved into a a vat of boiling corn water by an unseen child assassin. This is followed by an inexplicably long scene where they just play baseball.

It follows the standard summer camp slasher film pattern: some camp stuff, a gruesome murder, some camp stuff, a gruesome murder, some camp stuff, a gruesome murder. The camp stuff is pre-teens arguing about standard pre-teen stuff, over and over again. The murders are seemingly random and unrelated. These combine into a total lack of suspense or intrigue as it just chugs along pointlessly.

Angela has a wild hallucinatory homosexual flashback while making out with a boy on the beach. Later, she has another flashback of her cousin's mother proclaiming how much she has always wanted a little girl… to the boy who survived the initial boat crash. It ends on a creepy shot of Angela's penis, which is strangely the highlight of the film.
