Movie Review- Sleepaway Camp

The slasher subgenre has always been a relatively diverse one. More often than not, slasher films are able to take an unoriginal plot (killer chops up teens) and give it a slightly original twist. Sleepaway Camp somewhat succeeds at this.

The trailer is a bit misleading, as it portrays the movie as a campy Friday the 13th knockoff. Most of the reviews I read had treated like that, too. But this is far from it. While the location and overall plot of the film is nothing more than a knockoff, the script itself manages to set it apart as an extremely bizarre slasher movie.

There's very little horror to this movie; it plays out more like "Meatballs", but with a death scene every fifteen minutes. In fact, there's almost no suspense either. Instead, we're treated to extensive scenes of the campers playing baseball, pulling pranks, and generally just hanging around. Normally, this would provide ample room for character development,  but this time is wasted and used as pointless padding. That of course leads to one-dimensional character whom we care nothing about. And as is typical of slasher movies, the main character isn't given enough time to justify him being the hero; and in this case, there's no real hero at the end of the film, making him all the more pointless.

The makeup effects for the death scenes are decent, though. The deaths themselves, however are lacking in suspense and really predictable. And again, most of the characters that die are the ones who given the least screentime, and therefore we don't care about them. The film editing for the deaths seems a bit off, too. The pacing between shots of the dead guy to the the person who finds them is a bit too jumpy, but that's just me be picky.

(Spoiler Alert!)
The ending, which is really the only memorable part of the movie, is very confusing and poorly explained.
The killer turns out to be Angela, who in turn is revealed to be a man. This seems to have been done just to have a shocking twist-ending, as it's barely hinted at beforehand, and it doesn't explain Angela's motives. Albeit his motivation for killing people is pretty obvious (he kills the people who bully him at camp), but it's never explained why he decided to start killing people in the first place.

Overall, this is a fairly entertaining slasher movie. It's extremely weird, and that's really the only hook to this film. As a whole, it's pretty hackneyed, but if you're in to slasher movies, or just weird movies in general, it's worth looking into.

Enjoyment- 3/5

Quality- 2/5

IMDB Page- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086320/