Sleepaway Camp (trilogy)

Sleepaway Camp (1983), Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988), Sleepaway Camp III – Teenage Wasteland (1988) Yee Gods…it’s a complete trilogy and comes boxed like a first aid kit! Movie companies are sending out collections of Stanly Kubrick and other great directors, Alien collections, Star Trek and Star Wars collections, and what does your loyal B movie reviewer wind up with in his in box but a B movie collection! I guess it’s appropriate. These three (dare I say it) classics were all shot near Bremen, GA. back in the eighties and can be found firmly wedged in the ‘dead teenager’ category of movies. That is, the point of all three flicks is to have a plethora of dead teenagers piled up by the end of the movie. The real camp is long gone, probably a shopping mall by now but they were all shot in the fall after the camp was closed to keep expenses to a minimum. The original flick was more of a who dun-nit type of slasher fare. There is plenty of may-hem but you don’t know who the murderer is until the end. The two sequels are more of a when or how dun-nit type as you know who the wacko slasher is (same as the first movie) and are just following the plot along to keep up with the schedule of innovative killings. The two sequels also have the unusual fact of having Bruce Springsteen’s sister Pamela in the lead. It appears she left the acting business after starring in these two non-award winning efforts. What do you think? Was that a wise move? The third movie also has Michael J. Pollard in a small part as a horny toad dirty old man victim. He started with great promise way back in Bonnie & Clyde and now does this type of movie. Melanie Griffith’s sister (Tracy) also stars in III.

You can see the progression in these types of movies. The original has lots of kids at camp but by the 2nd and 3rd movie, the campers appear more like horned out teens. The level of nudity also progressively increases as you go from 1 to 3 as does the potential for aardvarking. The psycho transsexual killer also goes from camper to camp counselor so you can see lots of intellectual forces were at work here. And also true to form, most (not all) but most of the kids that get it, sort of deserve it, at least from the killer’s point of view. All three movies were rated R for: bodies everywhere, death by drowning in an outhouse, death by battery acid, death by boiling….I could go on for a long time…., horny toad teens, forbidden tent exercises, breastulations, pulsating gore, horrible camp songs, and for the awful mullet in II.