Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988)
“Two years of therapy, electroshock, was on every pill you ever heard of, plus an operation. I'm completely cured. If I wasn't they wouldn't have let me out.” – Angela
Oh, if only that were true.
Having covered the weakest of the Friday the 13ths last time, I was ready for a change of pace – and boy, I got it. But not in the way I was hoping. Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers is a film that makes Friday the 13th Pt 3 look like a masterpiece of cinema and a masterclass of performance. Sleepaway Camp 2 is a film so in dire need of a script, direction, actors and budget, it’s unintentionally fascinating and its sheer ineptness keeps you watching to see whether it actually improves or manages to get even worse. It’s not the Plan Nine from Outer Space kind of bad that it becomes comedic, it’s the kind of hypnotically bad that you watch with the same morbid attention as you pass a bad road accident.
The original Sleepaway Camp had a rawness to it that worked to its advantage. This coupled with the what I reckon to be the most twisted of twist endings to a slasher movie that I’ve seen. This sequel doesn’t have the same raw quality, and the big shock/surprise of course is no longer there. We know Angela’s secret – she’s actually male. But that’s even thrown away casually as part of her “recovery” has included a gender reassignment.
The new Angela (Felissa Rose was unavailable so we now have Pamela Springsteen in the role - and yes, her brother is Bruce, and obviously he got all the talent) is irritatingly perky and upbeat and gung-ho. She’s also an incessant chatterbox and a creepy, prying busybody. She has stringent moral standards, is certainly against fornication and is judge, jury and executioner of those who succumb to their fleshy desires.
And that’s really the whole plot and script. It has some interesting kills, but we don’t really see them. Any character development is sacrificed on the altars of bad writing, bad performances and ultimately a budget of $465,000. The script is a tenuous (at best) means of getting from one kill to the next, leaving us with an eighty-minute rush of eighties mullets, boobs and largely offscreen kills.
It all kicks off five years after the events of Sleepaway Camp at (yet another) summer camp, located a few miles from the site of the original film. A group of kids of an indeterminate age are telling scary stories around a camp fire, and of course the tale of Angela, reprising the events of the previous movie form part of the narrative, when a camp counsellor, Angela herself (with an assumed surname) pops up to escort the girl who’s with the boys after lights out back to camp, sternly marching her along – pausing only to murder her and cut out her tongue, reporting to the camp owner Uncle John, that she sent the girl home.
Okay, “Uncle John” not only seems far too old to be running a summer camp, but he’s also played by Walter Gotell is a spectacular piece of miscasting. Gotell is better known as General Gogol, the recurring Soviet head of the KGB in the Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton era of Bond films. And speaking of age, the kids at the camp in the first movie were clearly early teenagers. Angela is said to have been fourteen then, so she’d be nineteen here. Most of the campers seem to be the same age as her, or older. They’re easily very late teens to mid-twenties.
Whoever Angela sees having sex (and if they’re supposed to be underage – that makes for uncomfortable viewing) has to die. If you take drugs or use alcohol, you die. If you use profanity in your language, you die. If you ask to go home, you die.
Angela stabs, clubs, cuts, chainsaws and (literally) drills her way through the girls’ dorm as well as the several of the boys. One girl is forced into the septic tank of an outhouse, and drowned among the waste and leeches, a pair of twins are tied up and burnt alive, a guy has battery acid thrown in his face – and nobody really questions the rapidly dwindling cast.
If there’s a high point to this, it’s when two of the campers decide to scare the righteous Angela in home made Freddy and Jason costumes (which are just about on the safe side of copyright infringement), not reckoning that Angela will dress up as Leatherface with a real chainsaw.
There’s no real surprise at the end, Angela is alive and seems poised to kill the last survivor and we’re straight to credits.
Ultimately, the film was packaged as a comedy, but unsuccessfully. At best, this can only be considered a guilty pleasure – and that’s stretching it. But a year later, a third Sleepaway Camp was unleashed upon an unsuspecting audience. And I bet you can’t wait to read about that.