Review #298: Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988)
October 2024 Horror Origins Review #15- Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988)
When I wrote yesterday's review, my wife didn't react as positively as she usually does. When I pressed her further, she told me it wasn't as funny as my reviews usually are. So, I'm going to start this one off with a joke. Q: What do you call a sequel that completely forgot what made the previous entry good?
A: Sleepaway Camp 2!
[Cue laughter]
Sleepaway Camp 2 picks up four (I think) years after Sleepaway Camp 1, with "campers" (played by 25-year-olds) telling campfire stories. One of them briefly summarizes the plot of the previous movie, and another adds on that after the previous movie ended, Angela was arrested, sent to a psychiatric facility, rehabilitated, and was forcibly given a gender reassignment surgery (adding on a complaint that "our tax dollars paid for it" which is both bizarre coming from what's ostensibly a minor, and also hilariously prescient given the fearmongering still found in current-day politics). But before they can say Angela's name, a female counselor shows up, and she's angry- it's Angela, everyone! The killer from the first movie! She's the main character of this one! Isn't that great?
Cue 80 minutes of Angela gradually isolating and killing all of the named characters, while eluding anyone's suspicion for an absurdly long time until the director has met his minimum required movie length and then the two main 25-year-old campers catch up to her, discover the inexplicably abandoned cabin where she's been hiding the bodies, and almost defeat her but she manages to escape because pre-production had already begun on Sleepaway Camp 3. Then the movie is over.
I won't sugarcoat it: I really don't like this movie, and as I said earlier, I feel it completely forgot what made the first one good. In general I don't really like franchise horror where the killer becomes the main character because where is the tension supposed to come from when 1. you already know who the killer is, 2. you already know why they're killing people, 3. you know they're going to continue killing people without obstruction until the final act, and 4. they aren't even going to be defeated at the end because they need to be able to keep making more of these movies? And this is quite possibly the worst example of that. The first movie was good because it provided a mystery, the eventual reveal of the killer was unexpected, and once the killer was revealed you at least understood why they did what they did (even if it was ultimately because they were crazy). Here, there is no mystery, I know I'm not supposed to get attached to any of the characters because they're going to die, and I know I'm not going to get a satisfying ending and any conflicts before the end of the film will have a foregone conclusion. In this movie, Angela is able to kill anybody and everybody and also transport their bodies across a span of literal miles despite being a waifish woman with no muscle mass and even less body weight, because the movie script calls for it. Many of the kills make no sense and none of the characters are interesting, so why should I be invested in literally anything that's on-screen?
I should also mention that the character of Angela is utterly unrecognizable from the first movie. Not only is there a completely different actress (Pamela Springsteen plays the character for Sleepaway Camp 2 and 3, who doesn't resemble Felissa Rose from the first movie even a little bit) but that could be forgiven if the character had similar traits. But in the first movie she was incredibly shy and reserved, and every single character that she killed was someone who threatened her directly. In this movie, she is incredibly bubbly and outgoing, making quips every thirty seconds, volunteering to lead the campers in an impromptu camp song at one point, and instead of killing people who have wronged her, she now has a murderous obsession with immorality- with nearly all of her victims being the female campers in her cabin that were breaking the rules to canoodle with the boys after-hours. So instead of carrying on the character and goals of the previous movie, she's just become a generic slasher villain who punishes people for engaging in vices.
But she isn't the only thing that's become generic. In the first movie the camp actually felt like a camp, and the campers actually felt like campers. They went about camp activities. There was a schedule they stuck to and the characters had conflicts that weren't directly related to Angela. In this one, the campers only exist as far as they impact Angela, the camp only exists when and where Angela is in it, and the only rules are the ones Angela brings up in relation to the people she's killed. It feels like someone trying to put on a puppet show of a movie they watched but without all of the requisite puppets so uh, this chicken puppet is the mayor, that pillow is the train conductor, and these two stuffed animals are the entire chorus of townsfolk.
There's also a huge push this time around to make the kills unique, without any regard for whether they make any logistical sense. (There was a tiny bit of that in the first movie but most could be overlooked because of how sparse the kills were and how well-executed certain ones were.) In this movie, Angela routinely manages to knock out multiple people off-screen and transport their bodies literal miles without them waking up, some of her victims scream bloody murder while people are standing feet away without anyone hearing anything, and more than once a person receives a superficial injury which we have to assume just instantly kills them because no more is seen of them after that.
So, to recap: the main character is a complete reversal of what she once was. The setting is a pale imitation of what it once was. The kills are flashy nonsense and make less sense the more you think about them.
When you add that up, you get a bad movie. And you should tune in tomorrow, because we're not done yet.
(I should add, Lisa enjoyed this one and thought it was fun. Do with that knowledge what you will.)
Overall Rating: 2/10 Outhouse Leeches
Nostalgic Rating: 3/10 Missing Jock Straps
One More Little Bit of Icing on this Lazy Unrecognizable Cake: The actress on the poster above isn't even the actress that plays Angela in the movie. Apparently Pamela Springsteen was busy that day.
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