Okay, so I had fun last week watching those three old horror movies (Children of The Corn, Suspiria and The Hitcher) and I wanted to order some more, preferably from the 1980s, which was a great era for youth-oriented scare flicks. The only problem was that I'd already seen so many of 'em. I was really looking for ones I'd never seen, like "Hitcher" and "Children", but such titles were proving tough to recall, so I did a little Googling and came up with some lists, like "The 100 Greatest Horror Movies From The '80s" and others that were similar.
A few titles jumped out at me, ones I remembered from back then. They were movies I would not have attended at the time, due to reasons I've mentioned before, i.e. I would've thought they were too wimpy or too stupid or not on the level of True Horror (Texas Chainsaw, et al).
But these days I've been feeling nostalgic for 80s horror, with it's big-haired teenage victims and the according lingo of the times, and just "the look" of the 80s in general, and so in my search for unseen horror from that decade, I've been willing to overlook deficiencies that would have caused me, in my twenties, to denounce certain films and swear off ever seeing them.
Reading over an IMDB list, I came across the title "Sleepaway Camp".
Oh yeah.......I remember that one. It was a minor hit if I recall correctly, an indie movie that sounded like a steal from "Friday The 13th".
I looked it up on Amazon to be sure that it had at least some redeeming quality, and the reviews I read were uniformly positive. Not a single reviewer had anything negative to say. One remarked that it was indeed similar to "Friday The 13th", only more cerebral. Wow, imagine that. It all sounded good to me, and I needed my 80s Horror Fix, so I ordered it right away from The Libe, which has everything.
Tonight I watched "Sleepaway Camp" (1983), which has apparently become a cult favorite in the 36 years since it's release.
Oy!
Sometimes, dead is better. Stephen King said that. What I mean here is that sometimes, it's better not to dig something up that you knew was gonna suck in the first place, when you were using your first intuition many years ago.
The film opened with some nice photography of an east coast camping area, set around a lake. The trees were colorful and the mood was pensive and I thought, hmmm.......maybe I've stumbled upon an unsuspected gem. Maybe this is gonna be the Cult Classic that all the reviewers swear it to be.
I was unfortunately stripped of that notion soon after the first set of characters began to speak. As more scenes followed, and more characters were introduced - mostly adolescents from the camp - I thought to myself, "Boy, if they ever gave Academy Awards for stilted acting, this group would make a clean sweep"! Within fifteen minutes, the movie began to look more like a student film with a budget, like it was made by amateurs who had enough money to get the job done without it looking too cheesy.
Once I accepted that it was gonna be a C-Grade production, but with pro camerawork & editing, I settled in to watch, just hoping to get at least something I could sink my teeth into. I only wanted my 80s Horror Fix, and I was willing to sit through a daffy plot and goofy acting to do so. The story was all about kids away from home at camp for the summer, and the Dolphin-shorted, muscle bound, feather haired counselors who kept watch over them. The kids ranged in age from 12 to 18, and make up the bulk of the cast, so I wasn't expecting the characters to have any depth, I just wanted to be entertained and scared, if possible (haha). The script turned out to be fairly energetic. Many different relationships were built between the various factions of boys and girls, as the slightly older camp counselors took them through a variety of outdoor activities. Lots of stuff was happening, in other words, and every so often a camper was getting killed by an Unknown Psycho, just like in "Friday The 13th".
There is a fourteen year old girl in camp who won't talk to anybody. The other girls all make fun of her, as do most of the boys. Only one boy, the nice type, will approach her in an attempt to be her friend.
I don't want to make too much of their relationship or even to describe it in detail, but for what it's worth, this is the thrust of the movie, if it can be called that.
I hung in there because of the lively script, even when there was a decidedly non-PC moment early in the film that made me almost want to turn it off ten minutes in. By the one hour mark, though, I thought I might be able to cruise home unscathed, having seen a forgettable but mildly watchable horror film from the era in question.
Boy was I wrong about that.
I have already devoted way too much time and space to "Sleepaway Camp", but I will close by saying that in the final five minutes of what had been a third rate, though fun, ersatz slasher movie, a curve is thrown to the viewer that, to my mind, is so disgusting and downright demeaning to a certain segment of the population that I was completely repulsed and regretted that I'd sat through the film after all.
Just to mention, there is a "flashback" scene near the end that I thought was not only incoherent but also could be interpreted as prejudicial.
I mean, the ending of this flick is a mess, and it might make you throw up as well.
What could have been a low grade diversion turned out to be one of the worst films I have ever seen.
It's just garbage, in the end, and so I give "Sleepaway Camp" my very first Two Thumbs Decisively Down that I have ever given in any of my reviews.
I tried to like it, it has it's "good points" if you are being generous, and I know it's a cult favorite for less discerning horror fans than myself.
But I found it to suck, overall, on a level reserved for only the very worst of motion pictures.
Whatever you do, don't see "Sleepaway Camp". /////
See you in the morning, love all the night long. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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