Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988)

Sleepaway Camp is probably my favourite slasher discovery of this year. Campy, with a brilliant twist and material you quite frankly just couldn't and wouldn't make nowadays, it's the one out of every ten or twenty that you remember vividly, that you come back to watching again. It's a riot.

So it's only natural, in the big money-making machine that is often filmmaking, that someone would want to come along and mooch off of the original's success. In fact, it'd be fun to play a game where whoever thinks of the most horror movies without sequels would win a cookie. Along with action, it must be the most sequelled genre of all. But the difference with Sleepaway Camp 2 is that the usual 'big mystery' is already solved: we know Angela, the poor psychotic he-she from the original, is back with a vengeance, ready to slaughter slutty and insubordinate campers. Yes, as she reveals towards the end, thanks to a ton of good references from the doctors that treated her, she is cured and ready for gainful employment. Especially the kind that takes place in the exact same setting as her previous ordeal.

Angela is played quite nicely

Yeah...awful lot of this goin' on.

by Pamela Springsteen (yes, I found out, she is related to Bruce), and is the counsellor who surely has a problem with uppers, if her wide eyes and Osmondy grin are anything to go on. But while she is first to whip out a guitar for a round of Kumbaya, she is also the strict schoolmarmish one, who insists that "nice girls don't have to show it off." And who would she impart this wisdom to, if this camp (not Arrawak, but Rolling Hills) were not at least partially populated by teenage hoes who enjoy waltzing around naked? It seems Angela has found her calling.

Ultimately, there is nothing too remarkable about any of Sleepaway Camp 2. It is tamer in almost every aspect than the original: although there are a lot of young boobs, there's no full frontal that the original is so infamous for; the murders are far less graphic and imaginative; the bittersweet sleaziness that characters like Artie the paedo cook brought to the first is largely absent. And in absence of any tangible originality (especially in view of no less than six Friday the 13th movies preceding this picture), a lot of ideas are borrowed from elsewhere, with particularly glaring reference to the legendary Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

As Angela slowly but surely builds a scene straight off of the Sawyers' family Christmas card out of dead campers, each murder under the guise of sending the kid home for bad behaviour, the staff start to suspect something is going on. But not in time. They just become tally marks for Angela's body count, which seems to be the main driving force of the plot. In a story with this many minor characters, it is surprising to see a conclusions that leaves every single one dead, campers and counsellors alike.

What's more surprising is how little is made out of such brilliant source material. I kept trying to remind myself throughout viewing that this was a professional production. It's just that acting is largely dreadful (with the conclusive survivor-on-aggressor scuffle shockingly choreographed and edited), camera work is slow and unadventurous, little decent use is made of soundtrack, and the script is poor (not even in the 'so bad it's good' kind of way). In fairness, it is a decent enough movie for one of those fun film nights with friends where you laugh and drink and eat pizza and stuff. It's a laugh... but it's by no means a great horror.



Although it may sound like a typical alternative, I still feel that some kind of corny reunion special back at Camp Arrawak with the counsellors and/or campers who we can assume survived the first movie. Because that would have more meaning to it than this movie does, which seems to exist as nothing more than an under-the-radar slashfest with little further context. Sleepaway Camp left us asking questions, wondering about motives and morals, about pasts and futures. Sleepaway Camp 2 leaves us wondering, and then suddenly not wondering, why Felissa Rose didn't reprise her classic role.