Horror Movie Watch: Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers

One of the Schote sisters, after ‘smoking up.’ (Dad joke.)

This October, I’m attempting an ill-advised viewing of (at least) thirty-one horror movies. I’ll watch (on average) one movie a day, after which I’ll write some things about said movies on this website. Be forewarned that all such write-ups will contain spoilers! (And I’m going to spoil the original Sleepaway Camp immediately, so if you have any plans to see it, stop reading now.) Today’s movie is the sequel to a slasher cult-classic Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988), directed by Michael A. Simpson, and suggested by Amy Stupavsky, a friend and writer for U of T Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Taddle Creek and other venues.

As always, a big thanks to Toronto’s Queen Video for existing, as that’s where I’ve obtained most of these movies. (They even had the Sleepaway Camp ‘survival kit,’ all three movies in one package!)

What happens:

Those of you who have seen the original Sleepaway Camp (1983), will – no doubt – have the final scene burned into your memories and nightmares. The original is something of a cult classic that’s remarkable for being a cheap exploitation film that transcends its budget. It’s about eighty minutes of not-scariness followed by one of the most terrifying scenes in film history. In short, kids at Camp Arawak are being murdered, usually after they fun afoul of cousins Ricky and Angela. Angela’s brother, Peter, along with her father, John, were killed in a childhood boating accident, so Angela has been raised with Ricky by her aunt. The final reveal is that the accident actually killed Angela. Angela was born Peter, but was raised as a girl by the aunt. The final shot is one of the more haunting images in horror history, with a nude Angela – her face in a terrifying rictus, hissing like an animal – holding potential boyfriend Paul’s severed head and a bloody knife. (Nightmares forever!)

Sleepaway Camp 2 is no Sleepaway Camp. We open on a bunch of male campers, some of whom are majestically mulleted, and one female camper, Phoebe, around the campfire, telling scary stories. Phoebe beings to tell the tale of Camp Arawak (a.k.a. the plot of Sleepaway Camp) when head counsellor Angela (played by Pamela Springsteen – the Boss’s sister!) shows up. While the boys argue about what happened to that murderer – one says she’s playing ‘the dark-haired girl on The Facts of Life, while the other is outraged that he got a sex change in the ‘psycho ward’ and ‘the tax payers paid for it!’ – Angela reprimands Phoebe for sneaking out with the boys and orders her back to the girls’ side of Camp Rolling Hills. On her way back, Amy gets lost. That’s when Angela sneaks up on her, smashes her in the face with a log, then cuts out her tongue. Cut to the title sequence and the Sleepaway Camp 2 theme song, ‘Straight Between the Eyes‘ by Canadian heavy metal legends, Anvil.

Day breaks and the girls of Camp Rolling Hills awake to find Phoebe’s stuff all gone. Angela tells them she had to kick her out for fraternizing with the boys at night. The opening scene in the cabin establishes the various girls’ personalities: Ally is the ‘fast’ girl who sleeps without a shirt, the Schote sisters are always stoned, Molly is the shy, ‘good’ girl, Mare is the girl with the boss China Club T-shirt. (Fun fact: all the characters in the movie, save Angela, are named for the Brat Pack of the 1980s Hollywood.) Angela’s prudish nature shows up early on, when she tells Ally ‘nice girls don’t have to show it off,’ and she and her Uncle John, who runs the camp, lament the loss of ‘all the good kids in the world.’ (As opposed to the original Sleepaway Camp, I was never sure what age the campers in Sleepaway Camp 2 was supposed to be – some of the campers seemed as old as the counsellors.)

That morning, Angela leads the camp in their traditional song (Pamela Springsteen doesn’t share her brother’s singing ability), and the campers all grumble about the super-strict and super-weird head counsellor and muse on her sexual orientation. (This is a typical 1980s teen movie, where homosexuality is basically the worst quality anyone can imagine.) T.C., the head counsellor on the boys’ side of the camp and owner of an epic feathered blonde mullet, tells Angela that she can’t just kick kids out on her sole authority, and Angela makes some vague promises about conferring with him if it ever happens again. But it’s about to happen again soon – and hard. She comes across the stoner Schote sisters, getting high in the forest and making out with some mulleted boy (who I think is named ‘Anthony’). Angela breaks it up and the Schote sisters promptly pass out. Brooke Schote awakes, bound on a barbecue pit, and the first thing she sees is the charred skeleton of her sister. Then Angela pours gasoline over Brooke and lights her afire. Two more girls ‘kicked out of camp.’

Meanwhile, a burgeoning relationship between shy girl Molly and hunk Sean is beginning to blossom. But Ally has eyes for Sean, too. (Love triangle: activated.) The boys initiate a panty raid that night, barging into the girls’ cabin, taking their underthings. Angela breaks it up, but Sean insists, ‘they weren’t doing anything wrong,’ which is arguable. Anyway, the boys slink back to their cabin and Demi suggests the girls retaliate with a ‘jock strap raid.’ They do, and Mare (who it is suggested idolizes Ally) warns the boys if they don’t give back their bras and panties, they’ll see more of this, and flashes them. That’s when Angela finds walks in, and tells Mare she has to leave. She’s drives Mare home and gives her an ultimatum to apologize for her behaviour. (Angela thinks Mare is a good kid who’s been influenced and tainted by ‘bad’ girl Ally.) Mare refuses and Angela responds by taking a power drill to Mare’s head.

Angela – who reminded me more and more of an evil Millie from Freaks and Geeks as the movie went on – takes Molly under her wing, advising her on her romance with Sean (who she thinks is a good boy, even if he back-talks), and telling Molly she’s ‘still a virgin, and proud to be one.’ More kids fall victim to Angela: the ‘tit patrol,’ two creepy boys who photograph girls undressing, meet their ends. Then Anthony and Judd dress up like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees to scare Angela, but the tables are turned when they have their throat cut and are chainsawed to death, respectively. Ally continues fornicating – with fellow camper Rob, both in the bathroom and in the woods – but when she finds a note (supposedly) from her crush Sean, she runs to meet him in the abandoned cabin. Angela is waiting for her, and she stabs Ally a couple times in the back, then drags her into the outhouse. Angela dumps Ally in the leech-infested outhouse hole, where she either drowns in excrement or is bled to death by the leeches. (Either way, I was upset with this unceremonious end to the character named after my favourite Brat Packer.)

When Angela returns to the cabin, camper Demi has a bunch of questions: she’s called many of the parents of the campers who were ‘kicked out,’ and they’re all under the impression that they’re still at camp. Realizing Demi knows too much, Angela garrottes her with a guitar string. Another camper, Lea, walks in on this, and is stabbed to death. The next morning, Molly wakes up to find literally all the other female campers have been sent home. Uncle John and T.C., a little slow on the uptake, finally fire Angela for sending too many campers home without their permission. Sean and Molly go looking for Angela up by the abandoned cabin after they hear she’s been dismissed. Inside they find the corpses of all the campers who were supposed to have been sent home. Angela sneaks in behind them, subdues them, and ties them up.

Angela is preparing a meal for her two favourite campers when T.C. barges in. But Angela has planned for this scenario and tosses battery acid on his face, killing him. (I’m not sure if battery acid in the face is actually fatal; I’ll have to investigate.) Sean finally connects the dots and realizes that this Angela is the same Angela who killed all the campers at Camp Arawak. He taunts her, calling her ‘Peter,’ even though Angela has undergone sex reassignment and extensive psychiatric treatment (which didn’t really seem to take). Angela lops off his head with a machete, and places the severed noggin in a broken TV set for Molly to ‘watch.’ When Angela temporarily leaves (for reasons unknown … probably to kill some more people), Molly frees herself and runs. Unfortunately, she runs directly into Angela in the woods. Molly is able to wrest a knife from Angela, but, in backing away, falls backward off a (relatively short) cliff.

Meanwhile, one surviving camp counsellor, Diane, walks around the camp. She first finds the dead bodies of ‘tit patrol’ members Charlie and Emilio, then, heading to the camp office, finds a dead Uncle John and Rob. That’s when Angela walks through the door and stabs her up. Then Angela hitches a ride with a female truck driver, who either annoys her or offends her with her salty talk. So the truck driver gets stabbed to death, too. Molly, at the bottom of the cliff, comes to and runs to the closest street. A pick-up truck rolls up, and Molly thanks the stars until she sees the driver is Angela, who greets her with a ‘Hello, pardner!’ Molly responds by screaming and the movie responds by ending.

Takeaway points:

• Sleepaway Camp 2 is not unique in its time-honoured slasher tradition of teenagers engaging in adult behaviours like sex, alcohol and drug use, etc, being the first to die, but it’s unusual in that it makes the implicit message of other slasher films extremely explicit. Angela is vocally opposed to premarital (maybe even post-marital) sex, drinking, and acting out. Anyone who disobeys is quickly murdered. Even relatively innocuous transgressions like ‘back talk’ or pulling pranks are cause for murder. And it’s women who bear the brunt of Angela’s rage. When Ally and Rob have sex, Ally is the one who is killed. After the panty raid and jock strap raid, Mare is killed, while the boys are not punished. (The boys eventually die, but their murders are not directly connected to their actions.) What makes Sleepaway Camp 2 troubling is that Angela becomes, like all slasher movie killers do in their sequels, the nominal hero of the movies. So, murder-based ‘slut-shaming’ of women (which is the basis for most of the murders) becomes, in some ways, endorsed by the film. Or maybe, in being so explicit, it draws attention to this message in other slasher movies. (I guess that’s up for some debate.) But the Sleepaway Camp series has never been known for its open-mindedness. (After all, in the first film, the incident that leads Angela to become a killer is her witnessing of her father and his gay lover having totally consensual and romantic sex.) All this is to say, given how socially regressive the movie is in so many ways, I was pleasantly surprised to see a scene of (interrupted) cunnilingus.
• Sleepaway Camp 2 also suffers in having no (truly astounding) twist at its finale. The only real mystery is that Pamela Springsteen looks almost nothing like Felissa Rose, who played Angela in the first film. But the character’s name is exactly the same, and we clearly see Angela kill Phoebe in the opening scene. So there are no mysteries to reveal at the end: it’s just a process of ticking campers off and seeing when and how they each die. Which, naturally, has its pleasures. But the first movie had those pleasures and then some. Apparently, there are two Sleepaway Camp continuities: one that follows from the original (which continues with the much later Return to Sleepaway Camp) and the continuity that follows from this movie, which are bit more self-consciously campy. This makes sense, since Uncle John – if he is supposed to be Angela’s uncle – is not mentioned in the first movie.
• There’s a scene where two of the boys, Anthony and Judd, dress up like other slasher movie monsters (Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees) to scare Angela. Anthony loses his Freddy Krueger glove, and finds it (the hard way) when Angela, now wearing the glove, slashes his throat. Which led me to shout, ‘The glove is real?!’ Like, seriously, the kid made claws out of actual blades? That’s just dangerous.

Truly terrifying or truly terrible?: Truly terrible. This may rival Leprechaun in the Hood in sheer awfulness. It’s a bit disappointing, as the original Sleepaway Camp was equally as bad, but still managed to be horrifyingly scary. But at least the body count is very high.

Best outfit: Choosing a best outfit in Sleepaway Camp 2 is like choosing the ‘best-dressed’ of the 101st Airborne Division. They all wear the same uniform: blue Camp Rolling Hills T-shirts and khaki shorts. But for rocking a really awesome China Club T-shirt while she sleeps, Mare wins the best outfit.

Best line: After a world-weary Ally has sex with the relatively inexperienced Rob, she deadpans, ‘That was fun. Listen, you don’t have AIDS or anything, do ya’? … Great … See ya’.’ Classic Ally. But it’s also really funny when Angela tells T.C. that she’ll call him to talk about Phoebe’s dismissal, and T.C. says to himself, ‘Where are you gonna’ call me? I don’t have a phone.’

Best kill: This is like choosing your favourite from a box of Charbonnel chocolates. Personally, I like the power-drill murder of Mare in the car, but strong arguments could be made for other kills. I did appreciate (maybe that’s the wrong word) the cruelty of Angela stabbing Ally in the back a few times, then forcing her to stand up and walk to her doom.

Unexpected cameo: Molly is played by Renée Estevez – Betty Finn from Heathers! – who also happens to be the sister of Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez. An album by thrash metal band Flotsam and Jetsam also makes a conspicuous guest appearance in the corpse cabin.

Unexpected lesson learned: Avoid getting battery acid on your face at all costs. Also, if your niece was just released from a psychiatric institution after murdering dozens of people at her camp, maybe don’t hire her to be a camp counsellor.

Most suitable band name derived from the movie: The Shit Sisters (which is what other campers call the perennially stoned Schote sisters) would be a great name for a punk band.

Next up: Science Crazed (1989).