Sleepaway Camp: Yes, It Is As Insane As You Have Heard

Sleepaway Camp was released in 1983 and is now considered a cult classic slasher film. It's pretty easy to see why. What I can't see, however, is how this movie makes any sense at all, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. First of all, it has one of the craziest, most out-of-left-field twists I've ever seen (although I've heard enough about this movie to know what it was, it was still pretty crazy). Second, the main actors haven't been in much else, and pretty much started and stopped their acting careers on this movie. Finally, James Earl Jones's father is in the movie for a few minutes, and it's kind of bizarre, really.

Set in 1983, Sleepaway Camp tells the cautionary tale of Ricky and his cousin Angela. In the initial scene of the film, Angela is on a small sailboat in a lake nearby Camp Arawak. The kids and their dad capsize the boat in jest, and then are run over by a bunch of idiots in a boat (as well as the biggest overactor I've ever seen in the form of a teenage girl water skier). Eight years later, Angela is going to Camp Arawak with her cousin Ricky, after a very bizarre and unsettling exchange with their wide-eyed seemingly insane mother/aunt. Once they arrive, Angela is nearly comatose until Ricky's friend Paul brings her out of her shell a little. She gets picked on a lot, though, but Ricky always defends her (sometimes violently). Eventually, her tormentors end up dead, and Ricky is suspected. After several brutal and sometimes inventive murders, nothing is ever actually resolved at all, and the movie ends. Super serious, guys.

In my opinion, this film is an extraordinary example of the slasher film. While the dialogue is extremely cheesy (a lot of the dialogue/bander seems awkward and stilted, as though it was written by someone who has only heard second-hand descriptions of common conversations), and we hardly ever see any murders actually being committed (though we see the grisly aftermath), the actual acts themselves are pretty crazy, and unlike slashers like Halloween or Friday the 13th, the killer isn't some crazy nearly-supernatural monster-man (or mother, in the case of the first Friday the 13th), the killer's just some camper. Well, they're more than just a camper, but that's for later. There are also a large volume of creepy and beefy counselors, that can barely act and have no idea what's going on most of the time. Most of the girls (aside from Angela) are kind of bitchy, too. There's one vaguely nice girl counselor that we see, named Susie, but she doesn't really do too much.

Ok, so here's the scoop on the twist ending. It turns out, Ricky was innocent, and Angela committed all the heinous murders (including killing a guy with a beehive in the bathroom, stabbing a girl in the naughty parts with a hot hair curler, shooting a guy through the neck with an arrow, and stabbing a woman through the wall of the shower). Not only that, but guess what, cats and kittens? Angela's not actually a girl at all! What a shock, what an amazing incredible twist! Turns out, Angela is really Peter, who we thought died in the beginning. When she went to live with her aunt, in her own crazy logical way, she decided that having two boys just wouldn't do at all. So she decides to raise Peter as Angela. Additionally, Angela/Peter is completely screwed up anyway, because when they were kids, assuming not too long before the boat accident, they saw their dad and his "friend" in a romantic (and vaguely awkward on-screen) embrace, which was a big shock to them, as evidenced by them giggling.

So at the end, she cuts off this kid named Paul's head (he had expressed a romantic interest throughout the film) and hums with it in his/her lap. When Ronnie (Beefy Counselor #1) and Susie (Only Nice Girl Counselor) stumble upon them, they're understandably dumbfounded by not only Angela's evident wang, but also this crazy face:

She's also making a strange animalistic hissing noise, too. I don't really understand that part, at all. And that's where it ends... We see this crazy face through the credits. Nobody really does anything, and we never get the idea that anything's ever really done about it (we never see her/him/it get arrested or have any real effort made to restrain, question, or frankly do anything at all about it).

The way that this film treats violence and women is particularly interesting. The girls and women are almost exclusively harsh, vindictive, or just plain crazy. The main character, which we think of as a traumatized and misunderstood girl actually turns out to be a boy, and kills a large number of girls (and a group of young kids in sleeping bags) and a few guys. Additionally, her only remaining parent figure (her Aunt) is shown as being absolutely and irrefutably insane, not only in making Peter dress like a girl and calling him by his dead sister's name, but seemingly distant, flighty, and probably hears voices.

The twist is insane, of course. The first third of the movie seems more like a wacky teen camp-comedy, but quickly turns around and becomes a murder-fest, full of lines like "*Gasp!* I didn't expect to see you here!" They also do a pretty good job of trying to conceal the identity of the person (considering all the hands and body parts of the killer that are seen are clearly male, and while the character of Angela is supposed to be a teenage boy forced in drag, the actor playing "her" is clearly a real female, which makes it especially mind-boggling.

Overall, I think I'd give it three awkward, screeching teenage transvestites out of five, or three beefy and vaguely creepy camp counselors out of five.

I Got Your Comet, Right Here!

Ok, so this movie wasn't what I was expecting. As in, at all. The movie poster featured above tries very hard to make this film seem like one of the earlier, and better, zombie-apocalypse films that have come before it. What I didn't expect was for it to be an extremely 80s movie, with big hair, bright colored outfits on valley girls, and the girl that was in The Last Starfighter (which opened the same year).

Basically, the same comet that probably killed the dinosaurs is headed back near earth, and of course, it has captivated the imaginations of everyone in L.A. That's the only way to explain how there are so few survivors. Oh, yeah, by the way, the comet turns everyone into Ovaltine. Or, some sort of red dust. Except for Regina and her sister Sam, two typical southern California teenagers, obsessed with arcade games and cheerleading, respectively. Sam likes to wear magenta and turquoise, and Regina sleeps with the projector-jockey at the movie theater and is angered by "DMK" getting 6th place on her favorite arcade game. (It's one of those "hey, it's not technically important now, nor will it ever be, but we'll call back to it once before the movie ends" kind of deals.) They're such well-rounded and crisply developed characters! I'm so glad that they'll comprise roughly one quarter of all the characters in the film!

This is the problem that I've always had with movies from the 80s: music from the '80s is absolutely awful. Not all music, mind you, but more specifically, the 1980s idea of what good movie soundtrack music should be. Costs of synthesizers and electronic drum-machines must have been at an all-time low in that decade, because there's no other reason they would be so universally prevalent. Also, and I'm not even kidding, there is a mall montage to Cyndi Lauper. Because that's what we all want to do when the world ends and all of our loved ones and friends get turned into a delicious chocolate powder: Shopping spree!

There is most likely some sort of commentary hidden in that particular crap-fest. The first place that the girls go is the local radio station, where they're met by Hector, who appears sporadically through the rest of the film. They encounter maybe two comet-zombies by this point, and the first one kills Regina's boyfriend (played by Michael Bowen, who would later play "Buck" in Kill Bill Vol. 1 and molest a coma-stricken Uma Thurman). Where was I? Oh, yeah. The mall as a place of refuge during apocalypse was done much better in Dawn of the Dead, where it actually has some meaning behind it. In this film, they prance around for a little while, and they're then briefly attacked by the former stockboys, who have taken over the mall in some militant "white panthers" gang, although they've conceivably run into no other survivors up until this point. They're not very important, anyway, but I wanted to note that their "leader," a strange little man in a smoking jacket that he was somehow able to embroider his name upon, makes dumb comments like a TV show announcer, and it's extremely annoying. Man, that guy sucks.

There are also some scientists after them, briefly introduced in the beginning, seeming to know that the comet will powderize everyone (actually, now that I think of it, it's kind of like "dehydrating" the U.N. or whatever in the Adam West Batman movie). They come out when they hear the survivors on the radio, and apparently think that they can harvest the blood of survivors to make some strange serum to cure themselves. For you see, they weren't completely protected from the comet's effects: it managed to sneak into the air vents and infect them slowly. Apparently, that's what the zombies are all about: they're being "Ovaltined" more slowly, which, of course, entails a "bloodthirsty zombie" phase. So these dumb scientists are slowly turning into zombies/powder, and because Regina was asleep in a movie theater projection booth (apparently encased completely in lead, making it safer than a fershlugginer bomb shelter), they really want her blood for their serum. Makes sense, right? Of course, the whole time, there are synthesizers screeching away in the background.

In the end, they're able to somehow defeat the crazy scientists (though they would have eventually turned into Nestlé's Quik anyway), and then immediately become "mature," with Regina and Hector adopting two survivor children rescued from the scientist-place, even though everyone on Earth is still totally dead. Sam, the rebellious cheerleader who at first might have been vaguely infected, but then apparently got better, was all "Like, yuck, guys, what with the grown-up clothes and responsibility and blah blah blah *gum chewing*" And then, some hitherto-unknown and utterly random survivor shows up in a super-sweet '80s convertible. It's DMK! Holy crap, they call back to something from the first five minutes of the film in the last five seconds of the film. Truly, Thom Eberhardt is a cinematic treasure and a gift to all directors. Luckily, he brought similar genius to that all-time classic Captain Ron. Yeah, seriously.

It's definitely worth the watch, especially if you like that sort of thing. I recommend it, but not too highly. On a scale of "I loathed it" to "I loved it," I'll have to give it an "I saw it" rating.