(My review of the first Sleepaway Camp can be read here. Also, that film's big twist is going to be spoiled here, because the sequels are very up front with it and flow directly from there.)
First up, the second film...
Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988)
Rated R
Score: 3 out of 5
Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers is a way more entertaining film than it had any right to be. Objectively, it's bad. The kills were heavily censored by the MPAA, the acting is hokey, it lacks the unique "coming-of-age story" atmosphere, interesting themes, and fleshed-out characters of the first film in favor of feeling like a ripoff of any number of summer camp slashers, and instead of a proper ending it just kind of... stops at the end. But you know what it does have? It's got an instantly memorable killer who kicks all sorts of ass, drops one-liners with the best of them, and is played as almost a warped parody of the final girls of countless '80s slashers, cutting out the middleman and just having the representative of traditional, conservative sexual morality also be the killer dishing out painful deaths against various degenerates. It's a winking parody of the genre and specifically the Reagan-era values that many people have read into it since, one that was actually made in the '80s at that, and while it is a deep cut that I'd only recommend if you're already a horror fan, it's one that had me laughing quite a bit -- especially watching it now, in 2020, in the wake of cultural shifts that have kept the film enjoyable but added another layer of subtext.
Said subtext concerns the fact that Angela Baker, doing double duty as the villain and our protagonist, is a trans woman, a fact that the first film revealed to the audience in a rather memorable final scene. Now all grown up and played by Pamela Springsteen (younger sister of Bruce), Angela, using a fake last name, is now herself the head counselor at Camp Rolling Hills, and because no good slasher killer can stop at just one killing spree, she decides to take on the task of purging the camp of all her loutish co-workers. That's the plot in a nutshell, and it doesn't get much more complex than that, at least not deliberately. The joke is that Angela, who would otherwise check of all the boxes for a proper final girl in an '80s slasher (conservatively dressed, prudish in her mannerisms, much more conventionally likable than the other characters), is not only the killer, she's hunting down the other counselors because of her morality. Her dialogue to her victims is filled with short speeches and one-liners outlining the awful behavior that got them killed, ranging from drug use to premarital sex to drinking on the job to talking too much, all the greatest hits that Randy Meeks warned us about in Scream. Angela would've felt at home as the hero in an '80s action movie as she does here as the villain in an '80s slasher, stealing the show in every scene she's in and always putting a big shit-eating grin on my face, such that I spent most of the parts where she wasn't on screen waiting for her to show up. She takes her seemingly corny shtick and pulls it into the realm of awesomeness.
I was talking earlier about more modern subtext, as well, and I was specifically thinking of how the framing of both Angela and her victims comes across in an era where transgender rights are more widely accepted, or at least discussed. As noted, even though the trans woman Angela is technically the villain, she's the villain in the same sense that Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger were in their later sequels, which is to say that she's the one the film really wants us to root for to wipe out all the human garbage in front of her. The other counselors, meanwhile, are all aggressively straight, and some of them are framed as Reaganites with their dismissive remarks about how their taxpayer dollars paid for Angela's psychiatric treatment. For as messy and problematic as this film can get, I got the sense that the filmmakers inadvertently -- or maybe not so inadvertently -- made a slasher version of the Lonely Island's "Spring Break Anthem" music video, in which a same-sex wedding ceremony is juxtaposed with the debauched behavior of straight college kids on spring break. It basically turns conservative morality on its head and turns the tables on them, with a representative of their narrow definition of "degeneracy" who is nonetheless the most moralistic character in the film coming to punish them for their own sins, the kinds of things that they often attempt to write off as "boys being boys" or "blowing off steam". With a few rewrites, this could easily be turned into a film about a left-wing activist going full Jason on a bunch of bigoted libertines, played either for camp in the grand '80s slasher tradition of the movie not-so-secretly sympathizing with the killer, or for horror as a satire of "cancel culture".
Like I said, this isn't some subversive masterpiece, and I'm pretty sure the aforementioned context was unintentional, even if it was interesting to think about. It was obvious that the MPAA had forced the filmmakers to heavily tone down the violence, as they were wont to do in the late '80s when they started seriously cracking down on the slasher genre, but even the kills that didn't feel edited down had some noticeably bad special effects. For example, the opening kill, involving a tongue being cut from a girl's mouth, saw blood noticeably squirted on from somewhere offscreen, which took away any impact it might have had. Angela also had a notable habit of using tree branches as weapons to knock people over the head with, which eventually became impossible to take seriously. This was a low-budget film, and the filmmakers did not know how to cover for such. The best kills were the ones that just went for comedy, most notably one that I like to call the "swirly from hell" where a girl is drowned in an outhouse, as well as the ones that had Angela delivering some funny dialogue. Save for Angela, every character in this film existed only to die, most of them framed purely as one-dimensional stereotypes and played by people who either couldn't act or couldn't care less. There's a lot of naked female flesh on display if you're into that, but even that has a lot less impact when I'm typing this from a computer with full internet access. And finally, the finale never seemed to find the point, simply petering out as it felt like they ran out of ideas without wrapping anything up with either Angela or the other counselors. It felt like it was leaning towards a "the villain wins" scenario where Angela finishes off the remaining survivors, but it spends much of the third act meandering as it progresses to that point, building to a final shot that did nothing for me. This movie was quick and dirty, and it felt like it not just in the production values but also in the writing.
The Bottom Line
It's not one of the greats like the original is, and if you're not already a slasher fan you probably won't get much out of it. But if you do love old-school '80s slashers, this one makes for a fun sendup of the genre thanks to its great killer.
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The third film, sadly, was not nearly as entertaining.
Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989)
Rated R
Score: 2 out of 5
Despite being, like its predecessor, a fairly short film, Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland felt a lot longer, and oftentimes, I was frankly bored. To keep it simple, this film had all the faults of Unhappy Campers, but whereas that film was elevated by its sense of humor, this one was just too dull to hold onto my interest. It felt even cheaper than last time, Angela's one-liners felt heavily toned down, her trademark moralism from last time only really cropped up in one scene without much to replace it elsewhere, and overall, it felt like it was just going through the motions. This may not be the worst film in the series (by all accounts, the fourth is downright unwatchable), but it's clear that, by this point, everybody involved was just cashing a paycheck.
After the camp was closed down following the events of the last movie, it's been reopened as Camp New Horizons by a well-meaning couple who wish to bring together rich kids and poor kids to overcome their differences. Angela takes the spot of one of these kids by killing her and assuming her identity, and it's not long before she gets to "work". I'm just gonna cut straight to the point, it didn't feel like Angela had much to do here except hack people up. The second film leaned heavily on humor to liven up the affair, with Angela feeling like a female Freddy Krueger with her one-liners while the rest of the film took the often-implicit moralism of the slasher genre, made it explicit, and played it for comedy. This film was clearly going for a similar tone, but this time, it failed to bring the humor. Angela is still an uptight moralist, but outside a scene where she kills a preppy racist (not coincidentally, one of the film's best scenes and among the few moments where it recaptured the original's magic), that part of her character is highly downplayed. The jokes are few and far between, and the film tries to take Angela a lot more seriously with half-hearted stabs at character depth, including flashbacks to the second film. Had they succeeded in making Angela a more complex character beyond just "the scourge of God", I might have bought it, but they completely whiffed the execution, the slower scenes where Angela is engaged in self-reflection feeling as though they'd been crowbarred in and never amounting to much. Angela here was flat and boring, and given how much she was the saving grace of the last film, that is not a good thing.
Because this film still makes all the mistakes of its predecessor on top of it. A few kills are interesting, most notably two involving a flagpole and a lawnmower (the latter of which got homaged years later by the show Scream Queens), but there is far too much chaff thrown in alongside it all. The problem of Angela attacking people by beating them with tree branches, and looking ridiculous in the process, is only exacerbated here, as somewhere close to half her victims get that treatment. Like its predecessor, this film looked and felt cheap, unable to rise above its budget. All of the supporting characters were broadly-written, one-note stereotypes, which worked last time when we were rooting for Angela to waste 'em but not so much here when she's not interesting either, and they are fatally stupid when it comes to even recognizing that there's a killer in their midst given how sloppy Angela gets. (Case in point: a kill in which she shoves firecrackers up someone's nose while they're sleeping. I liked the gore effects, but that should've given the game away right then and there given how noisy those things are.) The entire "summer camp" conceit felt more forced than ever; while the first film was done as a horror version of Meatballs, and the second film still remembered to show little kids running around the camp, here it felt like any number of "don't go in the woods" slashers about dumb teenagers going camping, the conceit about this being a camp where the rich and poor come together to learn from one another largely abandoned after the first act. I can barely tell you what happened in the third act, though given this movie's reliance on cliches, I can probably make a guess that would be 90% accurate. (And checking this film's Wikipedia page... I was right!)
Because this film still makes all the mistakes of its predecessor on top of it. A few kills are interesting, most notably two involving a flagpole and a lawnmower (the latter of which got homaged years later by the show Scream Queens), but there is far too much chaff thrown in alongside it all. The problem of Angela attacking people by beating them with tree branches, and looking ridiculous in the process, is only exacerbated here, as somewhere close to half her victims get that treatment. Like its predecessor, this film looked and felt cheap, unable to rise above its budget. All of the supporting characters were broadly-written, one-note stereotypes, which worked last time when we were rooting for Angela to waste 'em but not so much here when she's not interesting either, and they are fatally stupid when it comes to even recognizing that there's a killer in their midst given how sloppy Angela gets. (Case in point: a kill in which she shoves firecrackers up someone's nose while they're sleeping. I liked the gore effects, but that should've given the game away right then and there given how noisy those things are.) The entire "summer camp" conceit felt more forced than ever; while the first film was done as a horror version of Meatballs, and the second film still remembered to show little kids running around the camp, here it felt like any number of "don't go in the woods" slashers about dumb teenagers going camping, the conceit about this being a camp where the rich and poor come together to learn from one another largely abandoned after the first act. I can barely tell you what happened in the third act, though given this movie's reliance on cliches, I can probably make a guess that would be 90% accurate. (And checking this film's Wikipedia page... I was right!)
The Bottom Line
Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland is a film that felt like it was made strictly for the money, another signpost for a late '80s slasher genre that was quickly circling the drain by that point. It's not wholly wretched, but unless you're a serious fan of the last two, don't waste your time.
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