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So I was binging on movies one Saturday and was sucked in by an old 80s horror streaming on Prime called Sleepaway Camp. I couldn't resist after seeing the trailer, since the theme and the way the movie was filmed was full of nostalgia for me as a 90s kid growing up on 80s movies and TV shows, along with the early 90s stuff. So I had to give in and watch it. Was it any good????
**SPOILER ALERT**: I am going to talk about everything in this movie, and the ending, so if you haven't seen it but want to, you might want to stop reading right about now. But if you don't care, neither do I, so I will go on.
Sleepaway Camp (1983)
So Sleepaway Camp is supposed to be an 80s “campy” teen horror. As of today it has 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and is hailed as a classic. It’s about a mysterious string of murders that happen at summer camp for teens, where one by one the main characters are dying off. I will give it props for its old 80s feel and summer vibes, and the way it was filmed was fairly decent to me in terms of an old horror. But did I think it was a blow-your-mind awesome movie? Ehhh not so much.
Let me just spoil it right off the bat and say I already knew from the getgo that Angela was the killer. I just got that vibe immediately when she first showed up on screen, and the writers didn’t do a very good job of hiding that like they might’ve thought they did. The movie also had an incredibly familiar itch to it as well, like you’ve seen this kind of story before, and as I was watching I kept trying to scratch it into memory. By the time Angela killed the boy under the tipped over boat, I’d figured it out: Sleepaway Camp was a lot like I Know What You Did Last Summer - and not the movie version but the actual novel from Lois Duncan, which I read when I was a teen. That got me wondering if the creators copied her story, since the original Last Summer was published in 1973, 10 years before Sleepaway.
The characters
This was also one of those movies for me where I can’t say I really liked any of the characters - in fact some of them I hated so much that I couldn’t wait to see them get killed. Particularly the nasty bitch Meg and the child predator cook Artie. Although, Artie did not die as far as we saw, he only suffered very terrible burns when Angela caused him to pull the boiling pot of water on himself.
I despised the teens and their cliquey-ness - which of course was the theme and to be expected in youth peer groups and especially in a setting like a summer camp, but something about these kids was just yuck to me. Hell, I had more love for the jocks in Scent of A Woman than these kids, and those jocks were despicable! Plus seeing the boys running around in booty shorts was super cringe. I know, I know, that was probably a style back then, but not one that was easy for me to look at.
I also hated that it was another old movie where the extremely few black characters had little to no voices or roles whatsoever. I get it that “those were the times” and Hollywood still didn’t want to recognize people of color very much, but I just don’t know. You still had other classics like Hamburger Hill, Batman, and Ghostbusters that had no problems showcasing people of color. But Sleepaway Camp seemed to seriously want to send a message that this film is whites only. Robert Earl Jones - James Earl Jones’ dad by the way - was the only black character to even have some of the spotlight and a few lines, but still had to be the cook. The other black characters were two young guys also in the kitchen who had zero words and probably 30 seconds of screen time, they were only there to be seen and not heard.
An underwhelming - but definitely unseen - plot
So Angela was the quiet girl in the movie. In fact the quiet kid period. Supposed to be very introverted and giving everyone weird vibes. She hardly said much at all. She was bullied and hated by the catty girl group, and the boys would try to talk to her but they got frustrated that she would sit there in silence. The only one who seemed to win her heart - and her words - was the blonde kid Paul…..who she ended up killing in the end. I did understand her pain though, and her being treated like shit by everyone pushed her over the edge.
In about the last 35 minutes of the movie, the killings are coming faster, and Angela pretends she's on the lookout for the killer, but I don’t buy it. The only thing that threw me a complete curveball was that Angela……turned out to be a boy. Which we saw in the end when there was a flashback of her aunt verbally abusing a little boy named Peter and making him become a girl. Who was now Angela.
In the present, Susie and Ronnie run out to the beach to find Angela holding Paul’s head after she killed him. Angela stands up and faces them with a knife, naked and has a dick and balls. Susie and Ronnie are shocked to see that Angela is a boy, as she stands there wheezing with her eyes and mouth open wide like a demon…and that’s how the movie ends.
My score
Felissa Rose is the one who played Angela, and today she is one sexy-as-fuck Mature. She still does joke impressions of the end of the movie with her mouth and I can’t lie, I sure as hell wish she could suck my ding dong with it lol.
I can’t say Sleepaway Camp was the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but definitely not one of the best. It was disappointing yet I somehow expected it to be. I give the movie 2 stars out of 5.
Take care
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