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yendiSleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers. 1988. Directed by Michael Simpson. Written by Fritz Gordon
Yes, Friday's movie left me in the mood to watch its sequel. If the first movie in this series captured the essence of sleepaway camp, this one simply catches the essence of being camp. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
As is so often the case, the movie opens with campers (this time, from Camp Rolling Hills) telling stories around the campfire. Although it's supposed to be a trip for the boys, Phoebe has snuck away to hang out with them, and she tells the really creepy story of the murderer of Camp Ararak (which isn't that far from Camp Rolling Hills, of course). Just as her tale comes to its conclusion, Rolling Hills Counselor Angela (what a coincidental name*) comes along and tells Phoebe to come back to camp. As the girls leave, the boys theorize about what happened to the original Angela (one says that she's now Jo on The Facts of Life), but one boy, the son of the cop who arrested Angela, knows the truth. Angela was taken to an insane asylum, and while there, was given full gender reassignment surgery. She's now back in the real world, and no one has seen her since.
Meanwhile, Angela and Phoebe are arguing, and Phoebe finally gets so fed up with her camp counselor, she curses her out and storms off. Of course, she also promptly gets lost in the woods. As she wanders around, calling for help, Angela finds her again, and smashes her over the head with a log. She then cuts Phoebe's tongue out, as punishment for telling those horrible stories. Guess we now know what happened to Ararak's Angela.
Roll opening credits, and we fast-forward to the next morning, when Angela (who always, incidentally, has a smile on her face) cheerfully wakes up her cabin's girls, most of whom don't share her enthusiasm for mornings or camp. All of them are surprised to discover that Phoebe's bed is empty, until Angela informs them that she'd caught Phoebe doing bad stuff with the male campers last night, and had to send her home.
I need to pause at this point to point out the names of Phoebe's cabin-mates: Mare, Molly, Ally, Demi, Brooke, Lea, and Jodi. Male campers we met last night and later include Sean, Emilio, Charlie, Judd, Anthony, and Rob. Yes, all our victims are named after Brat Packers or other young stars often associated with the Brat Pack crowd. To top it off, the head counselor only goes by his initials ("T.C."), which are the same as a certain huge teen idol of the time (and contemporary religious looney). And the camp owner is Uncle John (as in Hughes, you think?). Yeah, this movie doesn't do subtle.
Anyway, back to the campers. We get the usual exposition, as we learn that these campers (all of whom appear to be somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five) are the usual band of bimbos and himbos, stoners, partiers, etc. The only younger kids we see are peeping toms who try to snap photos of the older girls in various states of undress. Poor Angela is the most enthusiastic camp counselor ever (watch her sing and play guitar on the "Happy Camper Song"), but none of the campers seem to share her enthusiasm for the more wholesome camp activities. During the opening scenes, it's established that Molly is the closest thing to a "good girl" in the bunch (she even defends Angela when others call her a bitch), and Ally is the official camp bitch (both vying for the affection of nice boy Sean).
While most of the campers are off on a nature walk or at the pool, the drugged out "Shit Sisters" (last name Shoat, but since they're always getting stoned, well, you can figure it out) head off to get stoned, and laugh at Angela's morning breakfast song. Angela, however, spots them, and her poor feelings are hurt.
The next morning, Angela catches the sisters drunk in the woods again, with one of them passed out, and the other one making out with one of the male campers. She sends the boy back to camp, even as the other sister passes out as well.
That sister wakes up to find Angela pouring the remains of a bottle of vodka on her. She sits up, and comes face to face with the burnt-up body of her twin! Alas, the living sister has her hands tied behind her back and is tied down to a large outdoor barbecue grill, so she's not going anywhere. As Angela pours gasoline on her and lights a match, she reminds the poor girl to "say no to drugs." One bonfire later, it's a moot point.
We cut to arts and crafts class, where a girl whines that she wants to go home, and won't accept any other answer that Angela gives. Angela finally says that she can arrange it, and we cut to . . . that camper actually being picked up by her mother. As the camper drives away, Uncle John jokes, "two down, thirty-eight to go," and Angela informs him that she also sent the Shoats home (which doesn't exactly break his heart, or shock the other campers).
That night, the boys stage a panty raid, and the girls retaliate. In the process, Mare is caught flashing the boys, and after Angela confronts her, insists she wants to go home. Angela drives her, and offers her one last chance to come back to camp. When Mare says that she'd rather die first, Angela reaches into the back seat of the car, grabs a cordless drill, and uses a spade bit on poor Mare.
The next morning's breakfast announcements include a list of items missing, which include bras, panties, that electric drill, a car battery, and other stuff. Angela wanders off during a morning break, and Molly follows her to the old camp, where Angela admits that she goes to think. The nice girl and her counselor have a good conversation about how to handle Molly's relationship with Sean (Angela is proudly still a virgin, and is horrified by how sinful girls are nowadays).
We then get to my favorite moment of the movie. The campers are blindfolded and forced to reach into various buckets held out by the counselors, as they're told they're touching "gopher guts" and the like. We've all been to parties like that (although usually at a younger age). As folks reach into Angela's bucket, she says that it's "dead teenager brains." When her fellow counselor Nancy asks her later what's really in there, she deadpans, "dead teenager brains." Nancy assumes she's kidding.
We cut to two of the older boy campers planning to scare the girls going on a campout by dressing as Freddy and Jason and scaring them. Meanwhile, the two peeping toms (named Charlie and Emilio, btw), are caught by Angela, and the pictures include Angela herself changing her shirt. T.C.. doesn't take their crimes that seriously (they're younger kids, and also favorites of Uncle John, so no way to kick them out). As a peace offering, he does warn her that two of his campers might try to scare the girls that night.
Cut to the nighttime. Our "Freddy" has lost his razor glove, and "Jason" goes to take a piss, telling him to find it by the time he gets back. "Freddy" sees the glove sitting on an arm across a log, and assumes his buddy is messing with him; however, that arm soon reaches up and slices his throat open**.
"Jason" then comes back, only to see someone dressed as Leatherface (complete with chainsaw). He assumes it's his buddy, until he takes a chainsaw blow to the leg. Crippled, there's no way he can run away, and Angela finishes him off. She then surprises the three camping girls with that costume, for the first time convincing them that she's actually kind of cool. However, she's surprised to learn that Ally had to go back to camp, claiming "cramps."
"Cramps," of course, turns out to be synonymous for "having sex with Rob in the bathroom***." Angela breaks it up and takes Ally back to the campsite.
The next morning consists of T.C. looking for his missing campers, a nasty confrontation between Molly and Ally (who is very jealous over Sean), and Angela comforting poor Molly. Angela jokes that Ally's probably "out fornicating," and sure enough, we cut to Ally and Rob in the woods, finishing what they started. Showing typical teenage bad girl concern for her health, it's only after the fact that Ally asks, "you don't have AIDS or anything, do you?" After sex, Ally gets back to camp and gets a note from "Sean" telling her to meet him at the abandoned cabin at 5. This segues into one of the the nastiest murder scenes I can recall.
Few kill scenes in '80s slashers squick me****, but this murder is nasty enough to fit right in with the current torturebation flicks. After Angela lures Ally to the cabin and confronts her (with Ally cursing her out again), Angela stabs the teenager twice in the back, then shoves the still-very-alive girl into the outhouse. We now get a view from inside the toilet*****, as Angela yells at Ally, telling her how horrible a friend she's been, berating her, and then tossing her all the way in, where there's not only the usual sewage, but also leeches. As Ally tries to crawl out, Angela takes a stick and keeps shoving the girl back in. It's a long, malicious, and nasty death sequence, and even with all the nasty stuff Ally's done (and with the usual horror-movie morality in place), it's tough to watch.
Cut to the camp, where we learn that Sean almost went to Camp Ararak the year of the murders (and Molly learns what Rob and Ally were up to last night). Demi, meanwhile, has decided to call her friend Mare, and is told that she's still at camp. She then calls Phoebe, and learns the same thing. She innocently tells Angela about this, not realizing who's responsible, and we get one of the more amusing scenes in the movie. As Demi is brushing her hair and trying to figure out what's going on, Angela is searching around the cabin, picking up and discarding potential murder weapons. She plays with a hanger, considers stabbing her with a pencil, mimes smashing her with a radio, and finally settles on a guitar string, telling the girl, "you talk too much," as she dispatches her******.
Angela goes outside, only to get soaked by a bucket of water that Charlie and Emilio had placed over the door. She decides to throw Demi's body out through the window, only for Lea (who, like Molly, is a nice girl, but always whining and threatening to tell on folks), to get to the cabin. She manages to unlock the door, and as she gets into the bathroom area with the body, Angela jumps out of the shower with a knife. "I didn't do anything," the poor girl screams. "You're going to tell," Angela notes (probably correctly) before stabbing her a few times.
Molly is horrified to learn that her friends have all been "sent home," but still believes it's the truth. We soon segue to Angela having a dream sequence that's really just an excuse to revisit all the death scenes (along with Angela's "Happy Camper" song). The next morning, even the jovial Uncle John has been pushed over the edge by all the campers who have been sent home in the last day, and Angela gets fired. Molly tries to comfort her, but Angela runs off.
Molly convinces Sean to help her comfort her favorite ex-counselor, and they head up to the old campsite, where Molly tells Angela how wonderful she's been. Alas, Sean manages to open up the cabin, where he sees the bodies of all his friends*******. As he's throwing up, Angela runs in and knocks him unconscious with a stick, and captures Molly as well. While both are tied up, T.C. finds out from Rob (the last of the older boys) where the others went, and heads up to the cabin to chew out his now-ex-counselor. Angela hears him, pours herself a nice bowl of car battery acid, and throws it in T.C.'s face as he opens the door.
As Angela tries to feed her two prisoners (who she still considers "nice" campers), Sean remembers that Angela is the name of the Camp Ararak murderer. Angela soliloquies on how she's been through therapy, shock treatments, medicine, and brags that she's cured. Sean makes it clear that he doesn't believe that, and she decides that this is reason enough to chop off his head. Molly faints at the sight, and wakes up with Angela telling her that there are plenty of other fish in the sea. She then points out that Sean's on TV, and lo and behold, there's his severed head sitting inside a broken television set.
Angela runs off to do errands (including bringing back the body of a camper who turns out to be Rob********, who gets killed offscreen, alas), and while she's doing so, Molly gets loose from her bonds. When Angela enters the cabin, Molly clobbers her over the head, leading to a long chase sequence with multiple confrontations. It ends when Molly falls over a ledge, and Angela assumes that she's dead.
Cut to twilight, and Nancy, the last of the counselors who've had any dialogue spots Emilio and Charlie at a window. Assuming they're up to no good again, she's horrified to find that both boys have been killed. She runs to Uncle John's cabin, where she sees Uncle John sitting in his chair, with his throat slit and his hand severed and resting on the telephone. She turns around, and sees Rob's body hanging from a noose, with a pair of panties stuffed in his mouth. While she's taking this in, Angela (who had hidden behind the door) comes out and stabs her (twisting the blade a few times afterwards). As she leaves the cabin, she tosses a cheery "goodnight campers" over her shoulder.
As we see Molly waking up from her fall, we see that Angela has hitched a ride with a woman who turns out to be the mother of the Shit Sisters and also the most annoying redneck woman not named Gretchen Wilson*********. Angela stabs her at a train crossing, and we next see poor Molly, walking along the road. When she sees a pickup truck stop, she runs up to the driver (who is wearing a cowboy hat that obscures her face), and then screams in terror as she realizes who's really driving the truck. We freeze frame and cut to the credits.
What makes this camp movie work so well for me? Well, we can start with the cast, particularly Pamela Springsteen (yes, the sister of Bruce) as Angela. She conveys a perky, always-cheery camp counselor perfectly, even as the body count piles up. The rest of the cast (including Renee Estevez -- also someone with famous relatives -- as Molly) more than holds their own. Since this movie is less about tension and more about camp, the quick pacing that director Michael Simpson employs works nicely, and the humor hits the mark every time.
The gore and effects are also great, which shouldn't be a surprise, since this movie's biggest claim to fame is as the debut of Bill "Splat" Johnson, one of the current greats.
Sleepaway Camp 2 is a departure in almost every way from the original. There's no mystery element here, there are very graphic on-screen kills, the campers are mostly much older, there are Hollywood in-jokes, and the entire plotline revolves around classic "sinners will die" slasher morality, with no exploration of revenge or sexual confusion as themes**********. All that being said, it's still a damned fun, nicely crafted movie, and probably one of the best of the late-80s slashers that seemed to hit the market nearly weekly.
*To be fair, no one knows the name of the original murderer.
**Yes, the camper built a glove using real straight razors. We never had art supplies that cool when I went to camp.
***The actor playing Rob was underage, and rumor has it that a stand-in was used for this scene.
****Not least because the ones that do cross the line -- the curling iron murder from the first movie in this series, or Jason slashing at that kid's crotch in the third Friday the 13th flick -- tend to keep the nasty stuff off screen.
*****The toilet being an overly-large board over the old sewage area. How Ally can fit through it is beyond me, but I'll assume that Angle might have cut it open a little bit with her drill.
******When camping earlier, Demi had mentioned that if she got sent home, her parents would strangle her.
*******The burnt bodies of the Shit Sisters are sitting with a copy of a "Flotsam and Jetsam" album.
********But who she calls "Matt" for some reason.
*********Actually, that's not quite true. Gretchen Wilson is still the most annoying redneck woman ever.
**********I still argue that the Angela from this movie isn't the same as the one from the first one, but simply a lunatic who thinks she is.
Yes, Friday's movie left me in the mood to watch its sequel. If the first movie in this series captured the essence of sleepaway camp, this one simply catches the essence of being camp. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
As is so often the case, the movie opens with campers (this time, from Camp Rolling Hills) telling stories around the campfire. Although it's supposed to be a trip for the boys, Phoebe has snuck away to hang out with them, and she tells the really creepy story of the murderer of Camp Ararak (which isn't that far from Camp Rolling Hills, of course). Just as her tale comes to its conclusion, Rolling Hills Counselor Angela (what a coincidental name*) comes along and tells Phoebe to come back to camp. As the girls leave, the boys theorize about what happened to the original Angela (one says that she's now Jo on The Facts of Life), but one boy, the son of the cop who arrested Angela, knows the truth. Angela was taken to an insane asylum, and while there, was given full gender reassignment surgery. She's now back in the real world, and no one has seen her since.
Meanwhile, Angela and Phoebe are arguing, and Phoebe finally gets so fed up with her camp counselor, she curses her out and storms off. Of course, she also promptly gets lost in the woods. As she wanders around, calling for help, Angela finds her again, and smashes her over the head with a log. She then cuts Phoebe's tongue out, as punishment for telling those horrible stories. Guess we now know what happened to Ararak's Angela.
Roll opening credits, and we fast-forward to the next morning, when Angela (who always, incidentally, has a smile on her face) cheerfully wakes up her cabin's girls, most of whom don't share her enthusiasm for mornings or camp. All of them are surprised to discover that Phoebe's bed is empty, until Angela informs them that she'd caught Phoebe doing bad stuff with the male campers last night, and had to send her home.
I need to pause at this point to point out the names of Phoebe's cabin-mates: Mare, Molly, Ally, Demi, Brooke, Lea, and Jodi. Male campers we met last night and later include Sean, Emilio, Charlie, Judd, Anthony, and Rob. Yes, all our victims are named after Brat Packers or other young stars often associated with the Brat Pack crowd. To top it off, the head counselor only goes by his initials ("T.C."), which are the same as a certain huge teen idol of the time (and contemporary religious looney). And the camp owner is Uncle John (as in Hughes, you think?). Yeah, this movie doesn't do subtle.
Anyway, back to the campers. We get the usual exposition, as we learn that these campers (all of whom appear to be somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five) are the usual band of bimbos and himbos, stoners, partiers, etc. The only younger kids we see are peeping toms who try to snap photos of the older girls in various states of undress. Poor Angela is the most enthusiastic camp counselor ever (watch her sing and play guitar on the "Happy Camper Song"), but none of the campers seem to share her enthusiasm for the more wholesome camp activities. During the opening scenes, it's established that Molly is the closest thing to a "good girl" in the bunch (she even defends Angela when others call her a bitch), and Ally is the official camp bitch (both vying for the affection of nice boy Sean).
While most of the campers are off on a nature walk or at the pool, the drugged out "Shit Sisters" (last name Shoat, but since they're always getting stoned, well, you can figure it out) head off to get stoned, and laugh at Angela's morning breakfast song. Angela, however, spots them, and her poor feelings are hurt.
The next morning, Angela catches the sisters drunk in the woods again, with one of them passed out, and the other one making out with one of the male campers. She sends the boy back to camp, even as the other sister passes out as well.
That sister wakes up to find Angela pouring the remains of a bottle of vodka on her. She sits up, and comes face to face with the burnt-up body of her twin! Alas, the living sister has her hands tied behind her back and is tied down to a large outdoor barbecue grill, so she's not going anywhere. As Angela pours gasoline on her and lights a match, she reminds the poor girl to "say no to drugs." One bonfire later, it's a moot point.
We cut to arts and crafts class, where a girl whines that she wants to go home, and won't accept any other answer that Angela gives. Angela finally says that she can arrange it, and we cut to . . . that camper actually being picked up by her mother. As the camper drives away, Uncle John jokes, "two down, thirty-eight to go," and Angela informs him that she also sent the Shoats home (which doesn't exactly break his heart, or shock the other campers).
That night, the boys stage a panty raid, and the girls retaliate. In the process, Mare is caught flashing the boys, and after Angela confronts her, insists she wants to go home. Angela drives her, and offers her one last chance to come back to camp. When Mare says that she'd rather die first, Angela reaches into the back seat of the car, grabs a cordless drill, and uses a spade bit on poor Mare.
The next morning's breakfast announcements include a list of items missing, which include bras, panties, that electric drill, a car battery, and other stuff. Angela wanders off during a morning break, and Molly follows her to the old camp, where Angela admits that she goes to think. The nice girl and her counselor have a good conversation about how to handle Molly's relationship with Sean (Angela is proudly still a virgin, and is horrified by how sinful girls are nowadays).
We then get to my favorite moment of the movie. The campers are blindfolded and forced to reach into various buckets held out by the counselors, as they're told they're touching "gopher guts" and the like. We've all been to parties like that (although usually at a younger age). As folks reach into Angela's bucket, she says that it's "dead teenager brains." When her fellow counselor Nancy asks her later what's really in there, she deadpans, "dead teenager brains." Nancy assumes she's kidding.
We cut to two of the older boy campers planning to scare the girls going on a campout by dressing as Freddy and Jason and scaring them. Meanwhile, the two peeping toms (named Charlie and Emilio, btw), are caught by Angela, and the pictures include Angela herself changing her shirt. T.C.. doesn't take their crimes that seriously (they're younger kids, and also favorites of Uncle John, so no way to kick them out). As a peace offering, he does warn her that two of his campers might try to scare the girls that night.
Cut to the nighttime. Our "Freddy" has lost his razor glove, and "Jason" goes to take a piss, telling him to find it by the time he gets back. "Freddy" sees the glove sitting on an arm across a log, and assumes his buddy is messing with him; however, that arm soon reaches up and slices his throat open**.
"Jason" then comes back, only to see someone dressed as Leatherface (complete with chainsaw). He assumes it's his buddy, until he takes a chainsaw blow to the leg. Crippled, there's no way he can run away, and Angela finishes him off. She then surprises the three camping girls with that costume, for the first time convincing them that she's actually kind of cool. However, she's surprised to learn that Ally had to go back to camp, claiming "cramps."
"Cramps," of course, turns out to be synonymous for "having sex with Rob in the bathroom***." Angela breaks it up and takes Ally back to the campsite.
The next morning consists of T.C. looking for his missing campers, a nasty confrontation between Molly and Ally (who is very jealous over Sean), and Angela comforting poor Molly. Angela jokes that Ally's probably "out fornicating," and sure enough, we cut to Ally and Rob in the woods, finishing what they started. Showing typical teenage bad girl concern for her health, it's only after the fact that Ally asks, "you don't have AIDS or anything, do you?" After sex, Ally gets back to camp and gets a note from "Sean" telling her to meet him at the abandoned cabin at 5. This segues into one of the the nastiest murder scenes I can recall.
Few kill scenes in '80s slashers squick me****, but this murder is nasty enough to fit right in with the current torturebation flicks. After Angela lures Ally to the cabin and confronts her (with Ally cursing her out again), Angela stabs the teenager twice in the back, then shoves the still-very-alive girl into the outhouse. We now get a view from inside the toilet*****, as Angela yells at Ally, telling her how horrible a friend she's been, berating her, and then tossing her all the way in, where there's not only the usual sewage, but also leeches. As Ally tries to crawl out, Angela takes a stick and keeps shoving the girl back in. It's a long, malicious, and nasty death sequence, and even with all the nasty stuff Ally's done (and with the usual horror-movie morality in place), it's tough to watch.
Cut to the camp, where we learn that Sean almost went to Camp Ararak the year of the murders (and Molly learns what Rob and Ally were up to last night). Demi, meanwhile, has decided to call her friend Mare, and is told that she's still at camp. She then calls Phoebe, and learns the same thing. She innocently tells Angela about this, not realizing who's responsible, and we get one of the more amusing scenes in the movie. As Demi is brushing her hair and trying to figure out what's going on, Angela is searching around the cabin, picking up and discarding potential murder weapons. She plays with a hanger, considers stabbing her with a pencil, mimes smashing her with a radio, and finally settles on a guitar string, telling the girl, "you talk too much," as she dispatches her******.
Angela goes outside, only to get soaked by a bucket of water that Charlie and Emilio had placed over the door. She decides to throw Demi's body out through the window, only for Lea (who, like Molly, is a nice girl, but always whining and threatening to tell on folks), to get to the cabin. She manages to unlock the door, and as she gets into the bathroom area with the body, Angela jumps out of the shower with a knife. "I didn't do anything," the poor girl screams. "You're going to tell," Angela notes (probably correctly) before stabbing her a few times.
Molly is horrified to learn that her friends have all been "sent home," but still believes it's the truth. We soon segue to Angela having a dream sequence that's really just an excuse to revisit all the death scenes (along with Angela's "Happy Camper" song). The next morning, even the jovial Uncle John has been pushed over the edge by all the campers who have been sent home in the last day, and Angela gets fired. Molly tries to comfort her, but Angela runs off.
Molly convinces Sean to help her comfort her favorite ex-counselor, and they head up to the old campsite, where Molly tells Angela how wonderful she's been. Alas, Sean manages to open up the cabin, where he sees the bodies of all his friends*******. As he's throwing up, Angela runs in and knocks him unconscious with a stick, and captures Molly as well. While both are tied up, T.C. finds out from Rob (the last of the older boys) where the others went, and heads up to the cabin to chew out his now-ex-counselor. Angela hears him, pours herself a nice bowl of car battery acid, and throws it in T.C.'s face as he opens the door.
As Angela tries to feed her two prisoners (who she still considers "nice" campers), Sean remembers that Angela is the name of the Camp Ararak murderer. Angela soliloquies on how she's been through therapy, shock treatments, medicine, and brags that she's cured. Sean makes it clear that he doesn't believe that, and she decides that this is reason enough to chop off his head. Molly faints at the sight, and wakes up with Angela telling her that there are plenty of other fish in the sea. She then points out that Sean's on TV, and lo and behold, there's his severed head sitting inside a broken television set.
Angela runs off to do errands (including bringing back the body of a camper who turns out to be Rob********, who gets killed offscreen, alas), and while she's doing so, Molly gets loose from her bonds. When Angela enters the cabin, Molly clobbers her over the head, leading to a long chase sequence with multiple confrontations. It ends when Molly falls over a ledge, and Angela assumes that she's dead.
Cut to twilight, and Nancy, the last of the counselors who've had any dialogue spots Emilio and Charlie at a window. Assuming they're up to no good again, she's horrified to find that both boys have been killed. She runs to Uncle John's cabin, where she sees Uncle John sitting in his chair, with his throat slit and his hand severed and resting on the telephone. She turns around, and sees Rob's body hanging from a noose, with a pair of panties stuffed in his mouth. While she's taking this in, Angela (who had hidden behind the door) comes out and stabs her (twisting the blade a few times afterwards). As she leaves the cabin, she tosses a cheery "goodnight campers" over her shoulder.
As we see Molly waking up from her fall, we see that Angela has hitched a ride with a woman who turns out to be the mother of the Shit Sisters and also the most annoying redneck woman not named Gretchen Wilson*********. Angela stabs her at a train crossing, and we next see poor Molly, walking along the road. When she sees a pickup truck stop, she runs up to the driver (who is wearing a cowboy hat that obscures her face), and then screams in terror as she realizes who's really driving the truck. We freeze frame and cut to the credits.
What makes this camp movie work so well for me? Well, we can start with the cast, particularly Pamela Springsteen (yes, the sister of Bruce) as Angela. She conveys a perky, always-cheery camp counselor perfectly, even as the body count piles up. The rest of the cast (including Renee Estevez -- also someone with famous relatives -- as Molly) more than holds their own. Since this movie is less about tension and more about camp, the quick pacing that director Michael Simpson employs works nicely, and the humor hits the mark every time.
The gore and effects are also great, which shouldn't be a surprise, since this movie's biggest claim to fame is as the debut of Bill "Splat" Johnson, one of the current greats.
Sleepaway Camp 2 is a departure in almost every way from the original. There's no mystery element here, there are very graphic on-screen kills, the campers are mostly much older, there are Hollywood in-jokes, and the entire plotline revolves around classic "sinners will die" slasher morality, with no exploration of revenge or sexual confusion as themes**********. All that being said, it's still a damned fun, nicely crafted movie, and probably one of the best of the late-80s slashers that seemed to hit the market nearly weekly.
*To be fair, no one knows the name of the original murderer.
**Yes, the camper built a glove using real straight razors. We never had art supplies that cool when I went to camp.
***The actor playing Rob was underage, and rumor has it that a stand-in was used for this scene.
****Not least because the ones that do cross the line -- the curling iron murder from the first movie in this series, or Jason slashing at that kid's crotch in the third Friday the 13th flick -- tend to keep the nasty stuff off screen.
*****The toilet being an overly-large board over the old sewage area. How Ally can fit through it is beyond me, but I'll assume that Angle might have cut it open a little bit with her drill.
******When camping earlier, Demi had mentioned that if she got sent home, her parents would strangle her.
*******The burnt bodies of the Shit Sisters are sitting with a copy of a "Flotsam and Jetsam" album.
********But who she calls "Matt" for some reason.
*********Actually, that's not quite true. Gretchen Wilson is still the most annoying redneck woman ever.
**********I still argue that the Angela from this movie isn't the same as the one from the first one, but simply a lunatic who thinks she is.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-15 10:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-15 11:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-15 11:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-15 11:52 pm (UTC)(I'm not a huge fan of camp horror movies (as opposed to campy horror movies), so I expect this revelation could be easily shot down by a connoisseur of the genre.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-16 12:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-16 12:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-16 04:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-16 06:34 pm (UTC)Although Alien lacks the morality issues inherent in the camp slasher, it definitely follows similar patterns beyond the character development. Right down to the final girl, final chase, and the last-minute "comeback" of the monster.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-16 08:05 pm (UTC)Average camp-horror movie - sex-inna-woods == baaaaaad.
Alien - corporations considering employees expendable == baaaaad.
Alien also is a good advocate for following quarantine rules.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-16 08:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-16 08:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-16 09:11 pm (UTC)- How many horror movies in this genre have the final chase be with a boy?
- Are there any gay horror movies where it's all guys or all girls who are
fooling around out in the woods when the killer strikes?