31 DAYS OF HORROR 2024-Day 30: SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983)

  Fun in the sun...NOT.

1975: Young siblings Angela and Peter go on a boating trip with their father and his male lover. When the boat capsizes, the father and kids end up in the path of careless teens in a motorboat and are struck. The father and one of the children are killed.

1983: The surviving kid, Angela (Felissa Rose), has grown into a traumatized and withdrawn teen who lives with her weirdo psychiatrist aunt and her cousin Ricky, who's for all intents and purposes Angela's surrogate brother. Angela and Ricky are sent to Camp Arawak for the summer, where Angela's shy and quiet nature instantly finds her marked for abuse by bullies and the camp's pedophile cook. Ricky does his best to protect her, but he can't be everywhere. The usual summer camp movie tropes and hijinx ensue, but then "accidents" begin to occur, and then a series of killings that escalate in levels of nastiness. As the bodies pile up and the mystery deepens, the question is who is the killer? The answer is revealed in a disturbing flashback that leads to a now legendary shock ending.

 

Just one of the many fun summer activities at Camp Arawak.

Of the many '80's slasher movies set at a summer camp, SLEEPAWAY CAMP is perhaps the most unusual. We get a decent number of kills, including vaginal penetration with a hot electric curling iron and death by active beehive, and the script treats the audience like it's not composed solely of drooling idiots. We automatically identify with the traumatized and abused Angela, so it's cathartic seeing her tormentors meet horrible fates.  

                   A slasher movie first: death by vaginal penetration with a hot electric curling iron.

I was late to the party on this one, not seeing it until the early 2000's, when I should have seen it at the legendary Norwalk Theater during, but at the time I was in the midst of my first semester of college, so I seldom went to the movies and spent more time doing my damnedest to pursue college girls. I regret missing it in the theater, but when I finally got around to it, I was surprised by how good it was. Yes, the bar for quality was quite low when it came to films from the '80's deluge of stalk 'n' kill flicks, so this one being as good as it is was a welcome surprise, and I think it may have gotten lost in the shuffle if I saw it during the sub-genre's heyday.

You'll not I do not go into much detail regarding the plot, and there's a reason for that. SLEEPAWAY CAMP is best approached with little or no knowledge of its particulars, and the information that I outlined is just the bare basics, so nothing was ruined. If you have not already seen it, avoid other reviews, as most of them give away everything, and some of the recent posters for the film spoil the ending, presumably because, much like PSYCHO (1960), its final twist is now famous, even to those who have not seen the film. It's not a masterpiece, but it is a solid little summertime shocker, and it deserves to be seen without much foreknowledge. Definitely one of the Top 10 slashers of its era.

Poster for the theatrical release.