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Sleepaway Camp Movie Review

Sleepaway Camp is a 1983 slasher film directed by Robert Hiltzik and starring Felissa Rose. It is one wild movie with a truly shocking twist.

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“Eat shit and die, Ricky!

Eat shit and live, Bill“

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Angela Baker, a shy, traumatized young girl, is sent to summer camp with her cousin. Shortly after her arrival, anyone with sinister or less than honorable intentions toward her gets their comeuppance. This is one of the most memorable 80s slasher movies and certainly one of the most unexpected in its final reveal that changed everything.

Spoiler alert – I am going to spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen it. The reveal is as follows – Angela is the murderer, but she is not really female. She was born as a boy and forced to leave as a girl by the child’s crazy mother. The final moment shows the child with a deranged expression and all bloody with a penis in plain sight. It constitutes one of the most shocking and clearly unexpected twists in the history of horror cinema and I definitely hugely appreciated its originality.

The movie is also very complicated in its sexual politics as it also depicts homosexuality in one memorable flashback sequence while also dealing with pedophilia, the latter through two very disturbing plot points. You can call the treatment of these issues dated and overly sensational, which to a degree it was, but still for an 80s movie to even deal with sexuality in such a forceful way is to be admired and it made the movie highly unique and brave.

The main problem with Sleepaway Camp is its cheapness factor. The acting is absolutely atrocious here. I really appreciated the cousins’ dynamic in the film and the villainous teen characters were pleasingly over-the-top, but the performances are uniformly terrible and even laughable in some instances, though that gave the flick a charming, rough around the edges exterior that worked to a point.

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It was obviously shot on the cheap and it shows – the costumes for instance are some of the campiest and trashiest ever in any 80s movie with men looking ridiculous and hilarious. The directing and editing are okay, but the kills are actually very well executed – in a more artistic and subtle instead of graphic manner, which I certainly appreciated. They were still extremely brutal in their implications, but not shown, and that was the best approach that they could take here. The dialogue ranges from dumb to interesting to even smart while the character interactions were goofy, but also very memorable and fun. Those reminded me pleasingly of Steven King’s storytelling.