We’re Back Here… Again

It’s been a while since we last visited Sleepaway Camp. We watched that first movie (which is transphobic and awful) and then were able to track down both Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers and Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland, and while neither of those two films were as offensive as the original movie, they were also equally terrible in their own ways. It should come as no shock, then, that when a whole trilogy of films are pretty wretchedly bad, interest in seeing further sequels greatly diminishes over time. While two further sequels were made, both 1992’s Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor (which didn’t even get finished until 2012) and 2008’s Return to Sleepaway Camp, actually tracking them down proved much more difficult.

Put another way: while I’m more than willing to pick up any random streaming service I need to in order to watch a terrible film, or pay a few bucks to grab a DVD of a bad movie, I draw the line at spending a hundred bucks or more to grab a film that’s both awful and has been discontinued. While I’m happy to provide a service here, watching shitty movies so you don’t have to, I think we all can agree that a line has to be drawn somewhere, and my line in the sand is going broke for Sleepaway Camp.

Besides, I knew that eventually, at some point, one of these films would show up on a streamer. I just had to play the waiting game. And I was correct because while the fourth film is still tied up in some kind of rights dispute that seems to be keeping it off streaming, the fifth film, Return to Sleepaway camp, was finally able to join the first trilogy of films over on Amazon PrimeWhile Netflix might be the largest streaming seervice right now, other major contenders have come into the game. One of the biggest, and best funded, is Amazon Prime, the streaming-service add-on packing with free delivery and all kinds of other perks Amazon gives its members. And, with the backing of its corporate parent, this streaming service very well could become the market leader.. And let me tell you, it was absolutely not worth the wait. This is an atrocious movie, poorly acted and even more poorly executed, that likely should have remained unavailable for anyone to see because this just isn’t worth the price of admission (even when the price is effectively “free”).

Ignoring the events of the first two films (and, we have to assume, the fourth), Return to Sleepaway Camp picks up twenty years later at a new camp, with new campers and counselors. However, one counselor remains: Ronnie Angelo (Paul DeAngelo), who was at the original camp when Angela (Felissa Rose) went on her killing spree. Those murders stayed with him, and whenever camp seems to be going off the rails, especially if anyone seemingly ends up dead, Ronnie freaks out and warns about “another Angela” happening.

But Angela is in a state institution, right? Well, that’s what the local Sheriff goes to find out, checking in with her cousin, Ricky Thomas (Jonathan Tiersten), to see if he knows. He says he’s been to see her every couple of months, and far as he knows she’s still there. But as bodies start piling up at camp, someone has to be responsible. If not Angela then who? The likeliest suspect is Alan Chambers (Michael Gibney), a rude little shit that no one else at camp likes. But Alan swears he’s not a murderer and flees the camp to get away. Is Alan doing this, or has someone else taken up Angela’s mantle to go out and kill and kill and kill again?

Return to Sleepaway Camp is a dreadful movie for a number of reasons, but the prime among them is that there’s absolutely no one that you can like in this entire enterprise. The film opens in a camp cabin with a few kids lighting their own farts (for some reason). Alan comes in, bullies all of them, lights his own fart, and then abuses them again when they talk back. He then goes off to the dining hall to abuse more people, complain about how no one likes him, and then get shitty again. And he is, functionally, the main character. While other characters interact with him, and often give him shit in the process, none of them get anywhere near the screen time or development that Alan gets. He’s the closest thing we have to a protagonist, and that’s really stretching the term since he’s an awful person that doesn’t learn anything, ever.

It should come as no surprise that because this is a Sleepaway Camp film, it somehow has to relate back to Angela. She pops up eventually as the killer, and the way the film works her in makes it feel like this movie was stitched together from two different productions. One film is a summer camp story about a disliked kid who, we assume, would learn something and grow to be the star of camp (a plotline that never happens). The other is a slasher about a crazed woman showing up to kill again. But the two sides never really intersect properly. Kids fight with Alan, kids die, but why they’re dying or how it relates to what’s going on at camp is never clear. Specifically, why is Angela killing the people that are picking on Alan when, far as we can see, the only person that actually deserves to die is the shithead himself?

This might have worked as a plot point if Angela, in any way, interacted with Alan. If the film built it up that she somehow saw something of herself, the abused kid that was picked on at camp, in Alan, then maybe we’d have some basis for understanding why she was killing everyone. Fact is if she was simply motivated to kill people that were acting abusing and cruel at camp, Alan should have been her first target. Alan should have been singled out from day one, and then everyone would be happy and kind because the only person causing any issues at camp was Alan. It would be a much shorter film, but a far more believable one.

Of course, working Angela in to actually have interactions with anyone else would have ruined whatever surprise the film had. See, Angela doesn’t show up as Angela until the very end of the film (for a killer reveal so ham-fisted it’s almost funny). Up until that point she’s been disguised as the local Sheriff which actually makes you question all the people she’s been working with when you really think about it. It’s shown (in a post-credit scene) that just a few weeks proper Angela killed the real Sheriff (who looked nothing like her, even under thick prosthetics) and stole his uniform. She then went around pretending to be the Sheriff, and, somehow, no one noticed or thought anything of it. She orders people around, goes on investigations, and everyone says, “yep, that’s the Sheriff.”

It’s clearly all done so that we can have a reveal to rival the twist reveal of the first film, but there’s no way to recapture that big twist, and trying to say, “Angela is at it again!” just doesn’t have the same spark. It certainly doesn’t help that the makeup used to disguise Angela is so bad that even in her very first scene, when the Sheriff walks in, I thought to myself, “is that a woman in makeup and drag?” I guess we’re supposed to think it’s clever to have a girl who was originally a boy now playing a man as her disguise but… that makes for even weirder gender politics I’m not able to comment on. Certainly the film is incapable of handling it with grace.

All of this would be forgivable, to an extent, if the kills in the film were at all good. The movie wouldn’t be great, but sometimes you can find enjoyment in a shitty slasher film if, at least, the murders are watchable. But Return to Sleepaway Camp was made on a shoestring budget, using a mix of practical and CGI effects that couldn’t even get completed until four years after the film originally wrapped production. The kills aren’t lackluster at best, and look laughably shoddy. There’s no tension and no horror to be found here, just a bunch of lazy kills that amount to nothing.

And that really is how I feel about Return to Sleepaway Camp in general. This fifth outing has a lot going on in it, but none of it is good and it all amounts to nothing. It’s very rare I find myself hating a film from minute one, but that was exactly how I felt about this movie. The opening scene was obnoxious, and it sets the tone for the rest of the film. I would be shocked if anyone could find anything to like in this awful little film.