Sleepaway Camp (1983)

Sleepaway Camp is an odd, somewhat odorous entry in the historic category of teenage slasher flicks. It has a particularly weird, cinematic halitosis, a kind of intellectual reek that sets it apart from even worse films. It is not, altogether, a bad film; yet, there is very little about it that could objectively be said to be "good." It is a sleazy, contrived, low-rent offering, but it does have a shocking finale that is somewhat unforgettable, if not grotesque.

The film opens with a man and his two children playing in their boat on a lake. The accents seem to suggest they are from Long Island, perhaps; definitely East Coast. A motorboat with a quintessentially Eighties duo of attractive, blonde teens whizzes by. A girl has demanded her boyfriend give her the wheel of the boat for their watery joyride. She promptly crashes into the man, John, and his two kids. He goes floating by the dead; a life preserver floats to the top of the bloody water.

Next, we see an intensely creepy woman, Aunt Martha (actress Desiree Gould) with an annoying habit of talking to herself, as if in an aside; saying things such as "No, no I'm afraid that wouldn't do at all!" with her finger raised to her lips, questioningly. The inference, from the start, is that she is mentally imbalanced.

The woman is preparing her two children, Ricky (Johnathan Tiersten) and Angela (Felissa Rose) to go away to summer camp. Her dotty, weird behavior is counterbalanced by the seeming normality of her two children. They are hustled onto the bus and are off.

Upon arrival, hordes of eager young teens come flowing from the bus, much to the delight of the pedophile cook and his not-so-merry cohorts of fellow camp workers. Referring to them as "baldies," the scene is set for what will come later, as a grizzled black man, Ben (veteran actor Robert Earl Jones), standing next to him, chides him, "They're far too young to even understand what's on your mind!"

Already, we have a handful of characters that are intensely untrustworthy and unlikable, if not outright detestable.

Angela and Ricky disembark, and it is clear right from the beginning that Angela has emotional issues, as she refuses to talk. Ricky is defensive of Angela, but runs into a girl he knows from school, an intensely conceited and snotty teen vixen (Judy, played by Karen Fields) who was enamored of Ricky at school last year but apparently thinks she's too good for him now.

The action gets underway with a quickness, as the pedophile cook Artie (Owen Hughes) attempts to molest Angela, and is discovered by Ricky. Slamming Ricky against the wall, he makes him promise to not tell. Both children go running out in terror, with Artie explaining to Mel (Mike Kellin), the head of the camp, "I must have just scared them, is all!" It is only later that the grisly touch of revenge will be enacted upon the perverted Artie, as invisible hands manage to pull a step stool he is using to boil a scalding hot pot of soup away from him, leaving him clinging to the edge. Of course, the inevitable occurs, and he pulls the scalding stuff over onto himself, burning himself quite badly.

The investigating cops, straight from B movie central casting, comment on how incredibly painful this must be, and how, "every nerve must be on fire." Be that as it may, it is only the beginning of the Camp Arawak killings.

Angela, much as anyone who dares to stick out, gets picked on and bullied by both bonehead boys and jealous girls alike. Meg (Katherine Kamhi), a putative camp counselor, can't stand her. She begins to hassle her whenever she sees her with her boyfriend Paul (Christopher Collet). Judy, the sadistic little tramp out to cause as much of a problem as she can, sets her eyes on seducing Paul, who, when attempting to kiss Angela, causes her to recall in her mind, in flashback mode, her father and his male lover Lenny lying in bed. Another puzzling scene has her and her dead sibling (who, we remember, was killed in the boating accident), pointing at each other in a weird, horrific juxtaposition; finally Angela runs away from Paul's kisses.

There are more killings. Mike (Tom van Dell) and Susie (Susan Glaze), neither friends to Angela, are floating out on the water after dark when Mark decides, apparently for fun, to capsize the boat. Susie swims to shore while Mark stays floating in the water, shielded by the boat. We see the back of a head surface ominously from the water. The next we know, Mel is discovering Mark's body beneath the boat, suspecting increasingly that it is the hostile Ricky who is committing the murders. His character is a weird, pseudo-comic caricature at any rate, and he seems no less slimy and detestable than the rest of the adults that staff Camp Arawak.

When a group of boys on a roof launches a water balloon at Angela, it sends Rickey off. Next we know, one of the boys, while sitting in the toilet, has a hornet's nest thrown into it with him by invisible hands. He is stung to death. Later, Meg, who is "dating" Mel that evening, is stabbed to death in the shower. A mysterious hand rinses off the blood.

By this time, it is glaringly apparent that the plot line of Sleepaway Camp involves the murder and mutilation of those who abuse or insult Angela. Making the denouement seem predictable. Yet, the film still has a surprise or two left up its sleeve.

Mel finds Rickey, and beats him after finding the body of his presumable teenage lover Meg ripped down the center. He then, since he is ironically situated at the archery range, is disposed of by an arrow through the throat. A number of kids left camping in the woods are disposed of by hatchet, and the one that left them, returning to find their bodies, promptly vomits.

Judy, the little conceited tramp, who, previously, has seduced and kissed Paul, an act discovered by Angela, who runs away from them--is tortured and killed in her room by hot curling iron. Her arms, the shadows of them at least, are seen reaching up toward the ceiling in agony. It's a scene mirrored in other old films, such as 1983's Mortuary, and the image has a certain strange power, as the shade of a soul reaching up from Hell.

"How can it be? My God, she's a boy!"

The other camp counselors find Meg's body, and two of them, Ronnie (the muscle-bound, hunky Paul De Angelo) and Susie, discover Angela seemingly holding Paul in her arms, stroking his head. She gets up, nude, and Paul's severed head rolls away. It is then that the shocking truth is discovered.

Angela is a weird, feral, hairy, sub-human psychopath. Her face freezes into a classic rictus of predatory insanity. Her eyes grow wide and terrifying as she screeches like an animal.

Ronnie says, "How can it be? My God, she's a boy!"

The opening credits roll as the camera pulls back, to reveal that Angela has male genitalia.

Before this though, we learn that Angela's crazy Aunt Martha, via flashback, decided to raise "Peter" (who actually died in the boating accident at the begining of the film), as "Angela" the "girl she always wanted."

There is an undercurrent of homophobia in this film, which dates it to an era when homosexual love was still the lurid stuff of cinematic taboos. The forced gender-reassignment that drove Peter to become "Angela", and thus, an insane murderess, is a hint that the filmmakers felt such a distortion in sexual identity would be enough to render someone psychotic and violent, full of an animal-like rage. This is nonsense, of course, and we live in more enlightened times.

However, the subtext of sin, buried secrets, bourgeois guilt and the resurgence of a terrible hidden skeleton in the dust-choked closet of yesteryear, permeates the film, making the banal surface of a suburban home, or a trip to summer camp, a threatening and unhappy state of affairs. It is the sort of world where even the camp cook tries to molest a little girl, where the owner is dating a girl far too scandalously young for him; where a series of killings can be enacted without anyone daring to shut the camp down and send the children, who are all obviously in danger, away.

In slasher films, the sins of the past surface through the avatar of a voiceless, faceless killer (Jason, Michael, and here, Angela). Often, the audience is titillated by taking the viewpoint of the killer, the camera literally making the spectator the butcher. This vicarious bloodletting may be cathartic, if not psychologically healthy. The sacrificial victims are all deserving subjects--sexually awakening; they live in the bourgeois contentment afforded to them by Reagan-era affluence. Beneath this surface, however, perversion lurks like a seething basilisk, awaiting the chance to emerge. The blood lust of this revenant--herein, a Gemini-twinned aberration that holds within itself both male and female aspects, has come forth to pay homage to a darker, older, stranger God of Vengeance--a dour spirit of the woods that brooks no nonsense from young or old; it dispatches all of them with equal fervor.

It lived, as "Angela" among them, finally in the end to be revealed as a thing truly feral, truly regressed, full of a primal spirit of blood and vengeance, enacting the ritual slaughter against those sacrificial lambs so deserving to feed the belly of the beast. The niceties and hypocrisies of the bland, middle-class exterior that poisoned the mind of little Peter to begin with must be made to pay. With blood. With screams. With DEATH.

In slasher film psychology, the past is never dead, but resurfaces, in a weird, crypto-zombie-like manner, a series of tulpas or golems to do the bidding of a darker, older deity, one whose knowledge of sin, retribution and the expiation of guilt through killing, is perfect, and timeless, and wise. In short: in slasher films, beneath the bland exterior of conventional life, lurks the swirling, inarticulate chaos at the core of reality, threatening to always manifest and tear asunder the placid, mediocre exterior of our bourgeois existences. Make us pay, in other words, for the hypocrisy of our being.

On a more mundane level, we have a film that plays upon then-current social anxieties concerning homosexuality, transsexualism, AIDS, and child abuse--lumping them all together in an unhealthy soup. The image of two men lying in bed together romantically was shocking for audiences of the time, as was the final reveal of Angela's true sexuality. This lurking paranoia of the other was par for the course in an era when conservative political values were desperately trying to tamp down the burning fires of social resentment that would give birth to the cultural usurpations of ensuing decades. Sleepaway Camp thus is a somewhat odious relic of its era, but, not without a certain likable, albeit gruesome charm.