Classic Movie Review: 'Sleepaway Camp'

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

Directed by Robert Hiltzik

Written by Robert Hiltzik

Starring Felissa Rose, Mike Kellin, Paul DeAngelo, Jonathan Tiersten

Release Date November 18th, 1983

Published July 16th, 2023

When I first saw Sleepaway Camp, some time in my early 20s, I thought it was a goofy, silly, fun-bad horror movie. Now, in my 40s, the joke has worn thin. Instead of enjoying the terrible acting, the odd choice to show a large portion of a camp baseball game, and Felissa Rose's bizarre performance, these elements all feel like a massive waste of my time. Where I once laughed at the outrageous gory death scenes and THAT twist reveal at the end, I am no longer enjoying myself. Is it maturity or a general grumpiness that has set in? I can't be sure. One thing that I am sure of however is, I now have a Sleepaway Camp box set DVD for sale.

Sleepaway Camp is a slasher film set at a summer camp in the early 1980s. Angela (Felissa Rose) is being forced to attend by her bizarre Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould). Thankfully, Angela has her cousin, Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten), who threatens to fight anyone who gives Angela a hard time. That, at least, keeps the boys in line but it doesn't stop Ricky's camp crush, Judy (Karen Fields), from mocking Angela, with her camp counselor pal Meg (Katherine Kamhi), always at her side. These two-mock poor, silent and shy Angela at every turn.

But they may not be the biggest threat Angela faces at camp. Not long after arriving, the camp cook, a dirty, crusty looking creep, sets his sights on Angela. Trapping her in the walk-in cooler, the threat to Angela is very real. Thankfully, Ricky arrives just in time to make the save. Just as fortuitously for future victims of this creep, he's soon dispatched by an unseen killer. In a scene that defies basic logic and physics, the creep nearly ends up being dumped in a pot of boiling water. Instead of falling in the far too tall pot, he falls and drags the boiling pot onto himself, leaving massive, eventually deadly, burns.

This is the first of what will be several dead bodies in Sleepaway Camp, each a gruesome but also logic defying death. All of this leading up to a nonsensical reveal that is shockingly graphic, considering the circumstances, but not well thought out or presented in a way that makes much sense. Spoiler alert, Angela is a boy. Her crazy Aunt Martha adopted Angela after his sister and father were killed in a boating accident in 1978. In the five years since that day, Martha has forced a young unnamed boy, to live as Angela, a girl, even fooling her own son into believing that Angela is his female cousin.

The murders are supposed to be the result of a growing sense of rage over his/her identity, his/her declining mental state, and the people who have mistreated and bullied Angela since she arrived at the camp. But the film is so oddly desperate to hide its big twist that it includes murders of numerous people who have nothing to do with bullying Angela. I know that logic isn't welcome in a movie this broad, silly, and low budget, but Angela's motivations aren't strong enough to sustain the narrative. What should be a cathartic rage is too often presented with the aim of creating a red-herring that never emerges.

The storytelling of Sleepaway Camp is clunky and the acting is atrocious. The stiff, amateurish performances, all building to that twist ending shot, make the proceedings feel even more ugly and exploitative than they already are intended to be. It's as if the sight of Angela's genitals is really all that the movie is about. It's certainly an unexpected sight, actually seeing ALL of Angela, and Felissa Rose certainly commits to the moment with her wild-eyed expression, but everything leading to this moment and in this moment are too unspeakably childish to allow the ending any real impact.

Questions are often asked about Sleepaway Camp as a trans narrative and that is not a question that applies here. Angela is not trans by choice. Angela's identity has been robbed from them and a new one has been forcefully assigned. That is not how being trans works. Trans is an identity that isn't a choice, and it's not something that can be forced onto someone by outside forces. So no, there is no trans narrative to Sleepaway Camp. This is a film about child abuse and how abuse drives the abused child to a murderous, vengeful, rage.

Sleepaway Camp is also a movie that is far too poorly crafted, edited, directed and acted to handle the massive weight of these very serious issues. Any movie that chooses to take on this level of abuse of a child had better be able to handle that weight and this movie cannot for a moment handle that. This is an exploitation movie; a child exploitation movie and the ugliness of that fact is no longer funny to me. When I was 20 years old, Sleepaway Camp felt edgy and yet dumb in that good-bad movie sense. Now, however, with more life experience under my belt, this isn't funny anymore. Nor is it as shocking or disturbing as it should be in order to treat this narrative with the gravity it requires.

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