Brenda's Review of Sleepaway Camp 1983 *Spoilers*

Transcript

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Good morning, this is Brenda, and I'm back with another horror movie review. And today we are gonna discuss 1983 Slepaway Camp. I watched this movie a lot when I was a teenager in the 80s. I hadn't watched it in decades, and it was brought up to me by a friend of mine and thought, well, I need to re-watch this. I don't really remember it that well. As always, there's gonna be spoilers in abundance. This movie starts off with a dad and his two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the water in a lake, and there are some teenagers on a boat that aren't really paying attention, they're swapping the drivers back and forth, goofing off. They show an accident, the dad and one of the children die. Flash forward years later, and they show the survivor, who we are told is Angela, living with a crazy aunt and her cousin. Angela and her cousin Ricky are getting ready to head off to sleepaway camp. This happens to be one of those movies that I bet my parents had no idea I was watching. It did not stand the test of time. I get that if a character is a child molesting rapist, they're gonna say nasty things. One of the cooks Artie even refers to the young girls as baldies and says there ain't no such thing as being too young, and it just creeps me out. Although I did see Phyllose who plays Angela on a documentary, and she speaks of Owen Hughes who played Artie as being this really nice guy and was always found reading a book when he wasn't filming. The scene where he's about to rape her and undoing his pants was filmed in a way that she wasn't in the room with him, so she didn't have to witness any of that. As far as the character Artie, though, I have to say fuck kitchen worker pervert. Later he is seen smoking a cigar over this huge vat of boiling corn. The stool that he's on ends up getting pulled out from under him and he pulls the whole vat on top of him, so he gets burned by the boiling water. The last thing we see of him is him getting taken away by EMS, and I think I'm kind of frustrated that I don't know if he officially died or not. There was another actor I had to look up in this movie because there was something oddly familiar about him. He plays Ben, and it is James Earl Jones' father. I was late to that parade not realizing he was in this movie. Poor Angela seems very shy. She doesn't seem to be eating much, she doesn't talk much. There's this little bitch Judy that really starts to bully her, calls her out on not taking showers with other people, accuses her of being queer, or not hitting puberty yet. Needless to say, people that are mean and bullying Angela start to die off. It definitely has the 80s feel. They're playing different camping games like the shaving cream in the hand, tickle the nose, and it ends up in the face. There's one where the kid has his eyes covered and sits up to find his face in a bare bottom, which is ew disgusting. Judy and her mean girl posse also try to throw Angela in the water, which is very traumatic for her because she had lost her dad and her sibling in the water. As far as I'm concerned, Judy needs to be the first one to go, but it doesn't really happen that way. But she does die, and I'm gonna leave that right there. I think killings in the 80s were always a good time. We get to see a drowning. Camp counselor gets shot in the neck with an arrow because there's always archery at these camps. We get to see a decapitation, somebody die from bee stings, a knife in the shower. If you're a fan of the 80s, look at the environment like I do. We see flex shampoo, a lover boy poster, things like that. It's something to just keep your eyes open for. The end of this movie was something that people talked about a lot after it came out since it was such a twist for the time. Angela's aunt wanted a girl so bad, we come to find out that it was the boy that survived and she raised him as a girl. She kind of snapped at the end, we see full frontal nudity, she has an odd expression on her face. The final scene which left a lot of people saying, What in the fuck did I just watch? In the documentary, Phyllis's mother refused to have her wear a strap on. They were actually going to try and use her real face. They ended up making a mask. They molded her face, made a thin mask out of dental acrylic, and used taxidermy eyes. This movie actually opened Thanksgiving weekend of 1983. It beat out Yentel and Amityville 3D. The franchise actually went on for a while. There's Sleepaway Camp 2, Unhappy Campers, 1988, Sleepaway Camp 3, Teenage Wasteland, 1989, Sleepaway Camp 4, The Survivor, 2012. I find this movie entertaining from beginning to end. Love all the kills, love the whole 80s feel. Evil fucking aunt, she's the one that caused all this by trying to raise that poor little boy as a girl, which would have been perfectly fine if it was his choice. Eerie? Eh. That's one of those things that might kind of be eerie at night. There are a few nighttime scenes, but I wouldn't call it overly eerie. The environment, again, eh, I'm not a camp person, but I do kind of like the feel of this, and maybe it's because of being set in the 80s. All my empathy in this movie is for Angela. She is the one that was bullied to the extent of making her kill people, and they all deserve to die. Fuck 'em. It's hard enough being a teenage girl and then forcing someone to be one who we don't even know if she really wanted to be one. I give this movie three and a half wine glasses and a shout out to Angela because every one of those fucks deserve to be killed. The bullies and aunt were a bunch of evil sons of bitches. Screw it, everybody gets wine. I'm on a rant. Join me next week for 2025's review of Undertone, and hopefully I'm gonna have Stacy with me. I've talked her into watching it, telling her it was about podcasting, so we'll see what happens. Until then.