With a number of potent changes in the slasher genre and some fascinating reversals, Sleepaway Camp is still pretty funny since its release in 1983.  This disc with commentary by director Robert Hiltzik and actress Felissa Rose is ample proof that the horror genre is still one of the most accessible ways for actors and new directors to make and entrance into the feature film arena.

During a summer outing, a tragic boating accident leaves several people dead except young children Angela (Felissa Rose) and Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) and years later the effect seems apparent.  Ricky is an outgoing happy child whereas Angela is withdrawn and rarely speaks.  Ricky and Angela are sent away to Camp Arawak for the summer but strange accidents begin to take place leaving more and more of the camp staff and children dead.  An overweight pedophilic cook is scalded to death, the camp joker is drown and mutilated, another boy is killed by stings from a swarm of hornets, and one of the girls is stabbed to death.  By the end of the mayhem the campers are fleeing in droves back home as the killer shows up for more.

Slasher films all follow the same formula which amounts to a mysterious killer dispatching characters one after the other in usually increasing degrees of extreme sadism with the motivation either not being immediately clear but ultimately being some psychologically deep-seated revenge on society.  Sleepaway Camp follows the formula perfectly, and with an added twist to create some macabre humor, and this is virtually the only redeeming element that keeps this mundane film on the ground, directed with little imaginative feel for the material.

The grand parents of this kind of movie are Friday the 13th with Jason as the indestructible man/child, and John Carpenter's Halloween, and the fact that the antagonist in this type of film has become super human and has survived gun shots, burning, stabbings, and keeps going on and on for sequel after sequel is a perverse pleasure to audiences worldwide.  The mythic power of the character and the evil deeds is rooted in the fact that most of us as viewers have neither the drive to kill anyone nor the warped personality that would allow it, much less in the extreme ways that most serial killers do in these types of films.

Many of these movies develop followings of viewers who love to be frightened by the ideas at work in them and who also find lots of funny stuff that they can laugh at while being scared.   As for Sleepaway Camp the leaden pacing adds to the overall tone of the movie as very much pointing to its own artifice.  All the stereotypical elements are in place: a tortured back story for the protagonists, a remote wilderness location, mysterious characters, bloody gruesome killings, and a surprise ending.  This helps the story by making it like all the other slasher movies but with differences in certain places.  Essentially it's a variation of the old haunted house tales from Sleepy Hollow with Ichabod Crane running to and fro trying to escape the headless horseman.

The interesting thing that writer/director/producer Robert Hiltzik has managed is the ability to keep the culprit a secret until the final shocking end of the movie without really any hint of the surprise ending.  Although in retrospect the story as it is does not make a lick of logical sense, it fits very well into the slasher genre and what we have come to expect with this type of story.  There are also the false leads that the director puts out to sufficiently misdirect the viewer's attention, and thus insuring some shock when we do discover just who the killer is and why they're doing these terrible things to the young boys and girls at this summer camp.

Overall the latent homoerotic nature of the film sets up the final shocking moments and lingers after the screen morphs into a fractured colored-tinged snap shot.  The repetitive scenes with young boys in tight wet jockey briefs, and the shots of muscled-up camp counselors in tight tee shirts outweigh any equally revealing shots of women in the film.  The closest we get to see any male-oriented cheesecake is when Karen Fields' Judy tries to force Angela to go swimming.  Judy is the femme fatale of the story and her comeuppance via a phallic beauty aid is one of the better moments of the movie.  The crowd of male torsos in the film is definitely one of the more imaginative ways that the formulaic genre is improved upon but doesn't add much to the straight male watching the movie looking for a few good glimpses of the naked female figure- that's one of the main reasons we watch a slasher movie in the first place to see naked women being staked by a killer with a knife!

Although Cinematographers Benjamin Davis and David M. Walsh do a fine job with the night scenes and the POV shots of the killer it might have helped with more money to have a sweeter picture emphasizing on the close-ups of the slasher aspects of the story.  We see actions and their results and it might enhance the visuals to bee more active details of the actual knife going into the skin, and the hornets stinging, although the way it is presented suspends a lot of the viewer's expectation.  Director Robert Hiltzik comments on this on the commentary track with actress Felissa Rose.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older