Sleepaway Camp

This article is about the horror movie. For the summer activity, see Summer camp.

Sleepaway Camp
Theatrical film poster
Directed by	Robert Hiltzik
Written by	Robert Hiltzik
Starring	Mike Kellin Katherine Kamhi Paul DeAngelo Jonathan Tiersten Felissa Rose Karen Fields Christopher Collet
Cinematography	Benjamin Davis David M. Walsh
Edited by	Ron Kalish Ralph Rosenblum Sharyn Ross
Music by	Edward Bilous
Production company	American Eagle Films
Distributed by	United Film Distribution Company
Release dates	November 18, 1983 (1983-11-18) (limited) May 25, 1984 (1984-05-25)
Running time	87 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Sleepaway Camp (also released as Nightmare Vacation) is a 1983 American slasher film written and directed by Robert Hiltzik, who also served as executive producer. The film tells the story of a young girl and her cousin who are sent to a summer camp, where a group of killings begins shortly after their arrival.

Released during the heyday of slasher movies, the film is infamous for its twist ending, considered one of the genre's most shocking. Now considered a cult film, Sleepaway Camp is also notable as the last screen appearance of Tony nominee Mike Kellin.

Plot

In 1975, John Baker and his boyfriend Lenny, take John's children, Angela and Peter, on a boating trip near Camp Arawak. Angela and Peter prank their father by capsizing their sail boat. They attempt to swim ashore where Lenny is waiting for them. However, they are in the path of a reckless speed boat, towing a water skier, Delores, and driven by a camp’s counselor, Mary Ann. John and one of the children are struck and killed as Delores screams in horror for help.

Eight years later in 1983, Angela has been living with her eccentric aunt Dr. Martha Thomas, and her son, and Angela's cousin, Ricky. Angela is sent to Camp Arawak for the first time, along with Ricky, who has attended the camp previously.

Due to Angela's introverted nature, she is constantly ridiculed and bullied, mostly by her bunkmate, Judy, and their counselor, Meg. Angela’s other counselor Susie and the camp’s head counselor Ronnie are sympathetic to her situation and do what they can to help her feel at home.

The cook, Artie, attempts to molest Angela, but Ricky catches him, and Ricky and Angela run out. Later, an unseen figure causes Artie to knock over a huge pot of boiling water on himself and he is severely scalded. Artie's incident is deemed accidental by camp owner Mel Costic.

At a social, campers Kenny and Mike mock Angela, prompting Ricky, and his friend Paul, to get into a fight with them. Afterwards, Paul befriends Angela. Later, Kenny is drowned, but his death also ruled accidental at Mel's insistence, even though Ronnie, and police officer, Frank, voice their skepticisms.

Afterward, Paul asks Angela to attend a movie with him. Later, campers Billy and Mike throw water balloons at Angela, and Billy is killed next, stung to death when he is trapped in a bathroom stall where the unseen killer drops a hive filled with bees. Mel starts thinking there is a killer in the camp.

The relationship between Angela and Paul grows strained when Paul kisses her, causing her to have a flashback to her youth when she and her brother witnessed their father in bed with Lenny. Angela recoils from Paul's advances and runs away.

During a game of Capture the Flag, Judy seduces Paul, and Angela finds them kissing. Guilty, Paul later attempts to explain himself to Angela at the lake, but is shooed away by Judy and Meg, who throw Angela into the water. After being rescued by Ricky, Angela has sand flung at her by small children. She is comforted by Ricky, who swears revenge on her aggressors.

Later that night, Meg is stabbed to death in the shower while getting ready to meet with Mel. At the camp social, Paul apologizes to Angela for what happened and she says, "Meet me at the waterfront after the social". Meanwhile, Mel finds Meg's body and is convinced that Ricky is the killer, since he had threatened most of the people killed so far, for bullying Angela.

At the same time, the six children who threw sand at Angela, are camping in the woods with their counselor Eddie, when two of them ask him to take them back to the camp. He returns to find the four remaining children hacked to death with his hatchet. Back at the camp, someone enters Judy's cabin and kills her by burning her with a hot curling iron and smothering her to death with a pillow. The camp is thrown into a panic with all the deaths. Thinking Ricky is the killer, Mel beats him mercilessly, only to be shot in the throat with an arrow by the real killer.

Frank, the police officer, is called and begins searching with the counselors for the missing campers. Paul is at the beach with Angela, who suggests they go skinny dipping. Frank discovers Ricky unconscious, but alive.

Ronnie and Susie find Angela sitting on the beach and humming, with Paul appearing to be resting his head on her lap as she strokes his hair. They are shocked when Angela jumps up holding a hunting knife, dropping Paul’s severed head, and they discover that not only is she the killer, but that "Angela" is actually Peter, her thought-to-be-dead brother.

It is revealed that the real Angela died in the accident and Peter survived. After Martha gained custody of him, she decided to raise Peter as the girl she always wanted, already having a son. Shocked, Ronnie exclaims "How can it be? My God, she’s a boy!”, as the nude and blood-covered "Angela", with male genitalia in full view, stands before the horrified Susie and Ronnie, while letting out an animalistic sound.

Cast

• Felissa Rose as Angela Baker
• Jonathan Tiersten as Ricky Thomas
• Karen Fields as Judy
• Christopher Collet as Paul
• Mike Kellin as Mel Costic
• Amy Baio as Brooke Warner
• Katherine Kamhi as Meg
• Paul DeAngelo as Ronnie Angelo
• Susan Glaze as Susie
• Tom Van Dell as Mike
• Loris Sallahain as Billy
• John E. Dunn as Kenny
• Ethan Larosa as Jimmy
• Willy Kuskin as Mozart
• Desiree Gould as Aunt Martha Thomas
• Owen Hughes as Artie
• Robert Earl Jones as Ben
• Frank Trent Saladino as Gene
• Rick Edrich as Jeff
• Fred Greene as Eddie
• Allen Breton as Frank Breton
• Michael C. Mahon as Hal
• Dan Tursi as John Baker
• James Paradise as Lenny

Production

The filming of Sleepaway Camp took place in Argyle, New York near Summit Lake at a camp formerly known as Camp Algonquin. In interviews, screen play writer and director, Robert Hiltzik, has said that he attended that camp that as a child.

Unlike many of its contemporaries, which had adults portraying youth, the cast of Sleepaway Camp was primarily made up of adolescent actors.

Release

Sleepaway Camp had a limited regional release on November 18, 1983. According to the American Film Institute, it had its premiere in Los Angeles the following spring on May 25, 1984.

Reception

Contemporaneous

On release, the film was frequently compared to Friday the 13th due to their shared settings and whodunit plot structure.

A review in The Courier-Journal characterized the film as a "Low-budget slasher in the Friday the 13th mold, with teen-age mayhem at a summer camp." In the Chula Vista Star-News, the film was deemed "a tasteless picture about mysterious murders at a summer youth camp that obscenely blends beheadings, stabbings, pubescent impulses, homosexuality, and transvestism with a cast of junior high school actors." The News-Press called it "A shockingly good slasher film, if you use the relatively fine first Friday the 13th as a measuring stick... it's just another crazed killer stalking nubile summer campers. But, this time, there are some truly creative killings and interesting plot twists."

Modern

On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 80% rating based on 20 reviews, with an average rating of 6.4/10. The consensus reads, “Sleepaway Camp is a standard teen slasher elevated by occasional moments of John Waters-esque weirdness and a twisted ending.”

The website Bloody Disgusting gave the film a positive review, praising Felissa Rose's performance and the film's twist ending calling it "one of the most shocking seen since, possibly, Hitchcock's Psycho". AllMovie wrote in its review on the film, "While most of the gender-bending story's sexual confusion is ultimately half-baked", "Sleepaway Camp is distinctive enough to warrant required viewing for genre enthusiasts."

Over the years, the film has gained a cult following from fans of the slasher genre and garnered critical reappraisal. Film scholar Paszylk called the film "an exceptionally bad movie but a very good slasher." Commenting on the performances in the film, film scholar Thomas Sipos wrote: "[the film] feels odd due to its contrasting acting styles. Most of the cast performs in a naturalistic manner, whereas Desiree Gould's performance as Aunt Martha is strikingly stylistic: broadly overplayed to the point of caricature."

In his book The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey (2009), film scholar Bartłomiej Paszylk characterized Sleepaway Camp as "elevat[ing] the kids to the position of the movie's mass protagonist and becomes a tricky metaphor of the unspeakable pains and anxieties of growing up." He further commented on the film's conclusion: "The epiphanous ending brings Sleepaway Camp further away from the likes of Friday the 13th and closer to such 1980s "slashers with a twist" such as Happy Birthday to Me (1981) and April Fool's Day (1986); but Hiltzik's movie goes even further than that: in this case the denouement doesn't just add a new dimension to everything we saw up to this point, but it pushes its way deep into our minds and stays with us forever."

Home media

Anchor Bay Entertainment released Sleepaway Camp on DVD on August 8, 2000. Anchor Bay reissued this disc as part of a four-disc set entitled the Sleepaway Camp Survival Kit on August 20, 2002, which also contained the film's two sequels, as well as a bonus disc featuring footage from the unfinished fourth sequel. This boxed set, which featured a medical red cross on the front cover, was discontinued in late 2002 after the Red Cross filed a complaint against Anchor Bay, who subsequently redesigned the box art to remove the cross logo. In 2005, the Canadian-based Legacy Entertainment released a region-free budget DVD release of the film. However, unlike the original VHS release, this release contains numerous edits to the film to either shorten violence or certain moments like dialogue.

Scream Factory released the film in a collector's edition Blu-ray & DVD combination set on May 27, 2014. This release contains a 2K scan of the original camera negative, and this release also has the film in its original uncut version, unlike the DVD released by Anchor Bay.

Related works

In the late 1980s, Hiltzik sold the rights to the successive Sleepaway Camp films, after which Michael A. Simpson directed two sequels, Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) and Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989). In them, Angela (now played by Bruce Springsteen's younger sister, Pamela Springsteen) resurfaces at a nearby summer camp, but this time masquerading as a counselor after a sex reassignment surgery. Much like at the previous camp, she gleefully tortures and kills anyone who misbehaves or annoys her. These films had more of a satirical comic tone than the original.

Another rogue sequel, Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor, directed by Jim Markovic, was partially filmed in the early 1990s but never completed. In 2002 the unfinished footage was released and made available as an exclusive fourth disc in Anchor Bay/Starz Entertainment's Sleepaway Camp DVD boxed set. In 2012 the film was completed (most of the film is archived footage from the first three films) and released on DVD and Amazon Video on Demand.

A new film, Return to Sleepaway Camp, was completed in 2003 and initially struggled to complete visual effects. It was directed by Robert Hiltzik, the director of the original 1983 film. He decided that this chapter will ignore the story lines of the previous sequels, stating that he wanted to pick up from where the original film ended. According to Fangoria, the digital effects were redone from 2006 to 2008. The film was released in 2008.

The purportedly final film in Hiltzik's Sleepaway Camp trilogy, titled Sleepaway Camp Reunion, was also announced to be in the works. Distribution had been arranged via Magnolia Pictures. Creator Robert Hiltzik stated that he would make the film if his budget was met. However, Hiltzik and "Return To Sleepaway Camp" producer Jeff Hayes have since started working on a reboot/remake that would retain the key characters and elements of the original film with additional storyline elements and a dose of modernizing. As of Summer 2014, Hiltzik was reportedly tweaking the script. Although he had no rights to the film series, Michael Simpson, the director of Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers and Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland, wrote a script for his series of Sleepaway Camp movies as well, titled Sleepaway Camp: Berserk.

Series creator Robert Hiltzik now owns the rights to the Sleepaway Camp franchise, which, as of 2013, is to be rebooted.

Works cited

• Harper, Jim (2004). Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movies. Manchester: Critical Vision. ISBN 978-1-900-48639-2. OCLC 475680187. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Paszylk, Bartłomiej (2009). The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 978-0-786-43695-8. OCLC 956654338. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Sipos, Thomas M. (2010). Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear. Jefferson, North Carolina. ISBN 978-0-786-45834-9. OCLC 607320273. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Stine, Scott Aaron (2003). The Gorehound’s Guide to Splatter Films of the 1980s. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 978-1-476-61132-7. OCLC 606990002. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Sumner, Don (2010). Horror Movie Freak. Iola, Wisconsin: Krause Publications. ISBN 978-1-440-21563-6. OCLC 775361341. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• Official Sleepaway Camp Site
• Sleepaway Camp at IMDb
• Sleepaway Camp at AllMovie
• Sleepaway Camp at Rotten Tomatoes