‘People are redeemable, you know?’
Ahh, the Sleepaway Camp franchise. A seminal if bizarre first film, a surprisingly decent sequel and then a huge drop in quality to the second sequel, an aborted fourth film in the franchise, and finally, this piece of turd. You might think that the return of Robert Hiltzik, the director of the first film, might herald a return to form for the franchise, but there is a reason that Hiltzik doesn’t have a single directorial credit between the first film and this one, and that reason is that he’s a bad filmmaker…
There is very little to report here in terms of plot. We’re at Camp Manabe and people are turning up dead. Jonathan Tiersten from the first film returns as Ricky. Bizarrely, Vincent Pastore from The Sopranos and Isaac ‘Chef from South Park‘ Hayes both appear (and provide the only coherent moments of the film). The special effects, apparently retouched over many years (there was a five-year gap between wrap and release), are atrocious. All of the acting is a disgrace to the profession. The nominal protagonist, queasily portrayed by unknown Michael Gibney (his only other credit of note is a minor role on Mrs Brown’s Boys, which perhaps tells you everything you need to know), is one of the most obnoxious and repellent characters ever committed to film. Everything about this is bad.
When a film opens with a group of teenagers lighting their farts while bad CGI flames appear from between their legs, you know you’re in trouble. It doesn’t get any better from there. This is a film that features a ‘joke’ every 30 seconds or so but is never intentionally funny. It’s cheap-looking; in fact, everything about the film is cheap. The only thing that can be said for it is that it occasionally accidentally feels like an actual ’80s slasher sequel, but not because of a deliberate effort on the part of the filmmakers to recapture a mood or aesthetic but rather simply because everything is so trashy. I will also concede that the opening theme song, credited to some band called Goat and Friends, is excellent.
One day, when I write a book about the worst horror movie sequels of all time, Return to Sleepaway Camp will have its own chapter. While it’s mildly entertaining, in the same way that watching a dog eating its own sick isn’t boring, this is a film with barely anything to redeem it – an utter disaster.
