My Shudder Picks: Sleepaway Camp
After watching Sleepaway Camp, it was instinctive for me to check out what the budget was for production. Everything just looks so cheap. And when I found out it was three hundred grand--at least three times what I had expected--I reflected back on what I'd seen, trying to decipher what it was that could have demanded so high a sum for the early eighties.
In my mind, it was a surplus of blowdryers and Aquanet hairspray. Everyone in this film--counselors and campers alike--look as if they'd spent a half hour coifing in front of the mirror before a take. The hair is just too perfect, the only thing which can be described as such, given all else. With this out of my system I will now try to explore the plot points of this movie.
The title and poster give away the slasher aspect, and I will not try to justify this film as being more than a cash-in on a low-budget horror craze, because it just isn't. Most people wouldn't give this movie the time of day, but once I realized how laughable Sleepaway Camp was going to be, I threw away all expectation and embraced it.
Two cousins go to a summer camp together in a remote section of New York state, inhabited by a plethora of Mike Wheeler and Will Byers lookalikes. The camp director is this older man who demonstrates incompetence right away when his campers start to get killed. He immediately suspects the wrong cousin of committing the murders, and as opposed to getting the authorities involved, accosts the boy in a manner highly abusive by today's standards.
With the exception of the bizarre reveal at the end, the most disturbing aspects of this film actually have nothing to do with the camp murders. The director, for one, should be arrested for covering up what is at least three kills. If he isn't bad enough, the camp's chef is a pedophile who lures a young girl into his kitchen and tries to expose himself. Some of the older campers are also quite mean and pick on the younger kids for the most absurd reasons.
But the most disturbing part of all is the writing of Sleepaway Camp. Anyone reading this blog right now can produce a better screenplay than what was decided on in '83. I absolutely guarantee it. There is no word I can supply here that can describe how poorly wrought these characters are, how poorly staged the build-up is to the finale, I mean I could just go on. But I'm not going to.
I give it a one star of four stars because there are actually some Friday the 13th sequels which are worse, believe it or not. (Rotten Tomatoes gave this an eighty percent!)
