Sleepaway Camp (1983)

(Tubi Streaming, April 2020) I’ll admit it—I didn’t go into Sleepaway Camp totally blind. I knew that there was a twist, and even remembered much (but not all) of it. Knowing this, I spent much of the film wondering whether the twist was enough to raise it above the many, many standard summer camp slasher movies that multiplied in the early 1980s. At first, I had a hard time believing that it would—Sleepaway Camp may eventually have shock value, but it does not have cinematic quality. The opening sequence is a flurry of shots that never seem to connect together, along with character relationships that aren’t that clear yet. The following sequence will make you question whether the film is going for a specific style or if it’s simply incompetent, with an overdone performance by Desiree Gould that highlights the titular CAMP. Things don’t necessarily get better once the action moves back to the camp, but they sure get less interesting: Our heroine (in what is actually a remarkable performance from Felissa Rose) is unresponsive to the point of catatonia, and the murders soon fall into the usual dull rhythm of slasher movies. Even my hazy memories of the twist were enough to get me to guess the killer—which isn’t all that hard, even though you run into basic physical problems in most of the kills. Still, there are, from time to time, touches of very stylized sequences—one of them being far less homophobic than you’d think, another being unusually sadistic in its cosmetic instrument of death. Sleepaway Camp doesn’t rise above its slasher nature for much of its duration… but then comes the ending. The shocking, bombastic, now-transphobic ending. The reason why the film’s final minutes dominate any discussion of Sleepaway Camp isn’t as much for its narrative merits: while it does justify the camp performance of one character, it also introduces basic believability problems that almost entirely destroy the narrative. No, the ending is a piece of work because the film revels in its glory for what feels like half a glorious minute, rubbing the viewers’ faces in the full-frontal freeze-frame evidence and insisting that we “SEE? SEE? THAT’S HOW SCREWED UP THIS IS!” Whew. Not a good movie. Not even a good twist. But I guarantee you that you won’t forget Sleepaway Camp the way you’ve already forgotten about so many other summer camp slasher movies.