‘Good night, campers…’
For 95% of its runtime, Sleepaway Camp is a fairly straightforward ’80s slasher. Some minor eccentricities aside, it’s essentially teenagers being murdered at a summer camp. A story we have seen played out many times before. But then, the last five minutes offer an incredible twist. A moment that is weird and baffling and genuinely frightening. This sequel leans into the sex and the violence from the source material but instead of a twist ending it has a fascinating meta commentary running through it, a full eight years before Scream pulled the same trick…
Five years after the events of the first film and Angela returns, this time played by Pamela Springsteen (sister of Bruce). She’s joined by a likeable if forgettable cast made up of Renee Estevez, Valerie Hartman, Brian Patrick Clark and many other actors without Wikipedia pages. As with the first film, Angela, now a camp counsellor herself, is murdering anyone whom she perceives to have wronged her. Unlike the first movie, there is no mystery here. We know who is committing the murders from the off. Rather than rendering the film more inert, it actually marks it out from its peers in an interesting way.
By 1988, when the film was released, the ’80s slasher boom had started to eat itself. This is clear from the fact that this sophomore effort contains explicit references to Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. All of this stuff helps to make Unhappy Campers a memorable and mostly enjoyable sequel. Sure, the acting is barely rudimentary across the board (Springsteen delivers a spirited but largely incompetent performance), the score is forgettable and the editing often puzzling, but the film has more interesting ideas than most of the other slasher films of the era and the sheer oddness of it all ensures that it is a fitting sequel to what is a truly bizarre original.
I think it’s safe to say that anyone choosing to watch Unhappy Campers of their own free will is already the target audience for this thing. If the concept of a second Sleepaway Camp film feels erroneous (or if you’ve never heard of either film in the first place), this is not the film for you.
