Census Bloodbath: Sleep out with your peep out

SLEEPAWAY CAMP

It's Halloween again, and you know what that means.  Like every year, we resurrect Brennan Klein over at Popcorn Culture for our October Switcheroo!  Sometimes I win, sometimes he loses, but either way, it means Brennan trapped in our own Cardboard Science format and reviewing 50s sci-fi classics or not-so-classics, while I wear his face for a while with some 80s slashers, Census Bloodbath-style.

1983

Written and directed by Robert Hiltzick

Spoilers: extraordinarily severe; or, everybody already knows anyway; or, I'm not sure, but you've been warned

Even more than it would be to describe The Empire Strikes Back as revolving around an unhealthy father/son dynamic, to describe a slasher film as transphobic—or to say, aw, I don't think it's that transphobic—is pretty much bound to be "a spoiler."  I was going to try to come up with some kind of teasing, semi-edgelording joke about ruining movies I still had numerous decades to see even if it was spoiled for me upwards of ten years ago (as, in fact, it was), but maybe I'll just let the observation stand by itself, because in the case of Sleepaway Camp about the only spoiler that discourse could've managed would be against a single visual anyway—a very striking visual, in fairness, but one that still pretty much works even if you know it's coming—because there's literally nothing else about the movie to spoil.  It might not be my argument, we'll see, but I think a perfectly reasonable viewer could easily walk away from Sleepaway Camp thinking that the fact that Angela is trans, or trans in a sufficiently functional way that we're still going to be using feminine pronouns and all that jazz, doesn't even matter, inasmuch as the movie would be basically the same thing if she were cis.  Certainly, if it's trying to use Angela's gender presentation as a blind, to make itself a better murder mystery, I'd have to say, "what murder mystery are you talking about?  Because we sure can't be talking about Sleepaway Camp."

It's also kind of a bad movie, for these and other reasons, some related, some not, which is why I've been so hostile right off the bat.  So what we have here is a Friday the 13th knock-off such as may have been born out of a much simpler question than any of the ones Sleepaway Camp seems to be asking: basically, "what if we did Friday the 13th, at a summer camp on the lake and all that, but for every specific decision Friday the 13th made about its setting, structure, and villain, we did the opposite?"  In between art college and law school, Robert Hiltzik decided to explore this question to the tune of 84 minutes, somehow or another actually managing to put together a reasonably well-heeled indie slasher flick—even on the higher end of the low-budget scale, though it's mostly spent on renting a camp and an admirable throng of extras—only to somehow never make another movie except a rebooted Halloween 2017-style sequel to the Sleepaway Camp franchise in 2008, despite having written and directed a film of sufficient reputation to have spawned that franchise in the first place.  Perhaps it's because he found his calling in family law.  Perhaps it's because, not to be too mean, Sleepaway Camp isn't going to knock your socks off with either its writing or its directing.  There are certainly ideas here, that must have been genuinely inspired, but then the execution is miserable: my favorite arrives in the midst of one of the artsily-filigreed flashbacks that we'll eventually get to, where we find Angela, closer to her original presentation, and the inhumanly-cruel maternal figure who's the cause of all this, and it's shot on this barely-extant set that's mostly a white staircase and black walls (that's the boringly artsy part) but which has also had (this is the inspired artsy part) the AC cranked up so high that her breath is literally frosting in the air inside this house.  And I barely had the chance to even notice this.  I doubt many people ever have, because the way the shot's staged, you can only see it for a tenth of a second when the backlight is in exactly the right spot relative to the camera.

But then there are ideas that only seem inspired, like the flash-forward prelude, regarding a certain Camp Arawak, now closed and abandoned.  Empty of all activity, nonetheless the soundtrack pipes in all the fun and games and grabass of a halcyon summer.  It's a mournfully nostalgic move, compounded by the visible signs of a season lost forever to the autumnal shades of red and orange that dominate each shot.  Then you learn that Hiltzik did his summer camp movie in September, in upstate New York, like some kind of fucking dolt, or at least like a pretty desperate filmmaker, and this is probably just an attempt to convince you that no, it's totally still early summer in his story, by way of the contrast between the autumn of the main phase of the movie and the later autumn of all these pick-ups.  It actually kind of works.  But it's cheating.

Well, then: from a flash-forward we move to a flash-back, eight years prior, and our film-establishing tragedy, which also happened lakeside (it's probably not supposed to be, but it might as well be Camp Arawak).  Dad John Baker (Dan Tursi) has taken his two kids (presently Frank Sorrentino and Collette Lee Corcoran) out on a sailboat excursion, which due to one of those crazy woman motorboat pilots you hear about ends very poorly, with John dead along with one of the children, and because I knew everything important about this movie beforehand, I have no right to say that an insert shot of the boychild makes it too obvious who the survivor was.  But now, having been to the future, and having been to the past, we return to the present in the fall summer of 1982, to find the approximately 14 year-old Angela Baker (Felissa Rose) living with her similarly-aged cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) and her wax sculpture of an aunt, Dr. Martha Thomas (a straight-up malfunction of a performance from Desiree Gold, who appears to have walked out of a 30s comedy about class struggle, where it still would've been jarring).  She's sending both of them off to camp, Angela for the first time, for no readily apparent reason besides the movie needing that to occur, and despite one flagrantly obvious reason for her not to; that's before we even consider how clearly Angela doesn't want to.  But we have to let movies have their premises, and so off the two kids go.

Ricky's initially stoked to be back, though a little stymied by Judy (Karen Field), his summer girlfriend of the year past, having blossomed into 1)something more like a young woman than he is a young man and, as a result, 2)a mega-bitch; and both the kids, along with probably any latterday audience, are little stymied, too, by the really odd and disorienting but I suppose more-or-less accurate mixture of ages and developmental milestones that populates this camp, though some of the featured extras are plainly just grown-ups.  (But there we have our first and always most important "exactly the opposite of Friday the 13th" element: a summer camp actually in operation, rather than counselors just kind of rattling around the place.)

Angela is so miserable and bewildered she lapses into something approaching catatonia, which of course does little to protect her from the evils that dwell in Camp Arawak, big and small, from the open child molester in the kitchen for whom the icky aphorism "if there's grass on the field, play ball" would represent a marked behavioral improvement (Owen Hughes), to the bullying she receives from Judy, whom I surely did not describe as a mega-bitch just because she liked tall boys with muscles, to one of the counselors, Meg (Katherine Kamhi), and I'm going to go on a complete tangent now, because Meg is one of the most "what is this character?" characters I've ever encountered, even in a slasher.  She's like 20, right, and she's an absolute gorgon to Angela for the crime of being quiet, still, and, to all appearances, the lowest-maintenance of any her charges; she is also, it turns out, just about spontaneously ovulating for her boss Mel (Mike Kellin), a late-period, which is to say, cancer-period Edward G. Robinsonesque cigar-chomper in his early 60s, looking every second of it, and who has achieved the paramount status of owning a threadbare and tenuous kid's summer camp.  I'm not even moralizing about this, it's simply so utterly strange, and feels stranger than I think you could imagine without seeing it, because the movie seems entirely oblivious to it, like Hiltzik would be completely confused if you even asked him about it.

Anyway, there are some brighter spots for Angela, like two of the other counselors, Ronnie (Paul DeAngelo), a good dude, and Susie (Susan Glaze), also a good dude albeit much less effectively, and above all Ricky's summer pal, Paul (Christopher Collet), who strikes up a tentative little romance with mousy Angela.  Unfortunately, that romance is just going to be an extension of Angela's vulnerabilities and another way for Judy to strike at her.  So what ensues isn't surprising if you know what genre you're in: one by one, all the people who've trespassed against Angela die.  (Also a small collection of random children in the woods, which annoys me because it seems wholly gratuitous, and, being offscreen to boot, doesn't even happen for aesthetic reasons.)

So we have ourselves a murder mystery, fellas (the second way it's zigging where Friday the 13th zagged), but, unfortunately, one that Hiltzik up and forgets to make even slightly mysterious until victim three or four, surely more than halfway through these 84 minutes, when Mel begins to suspect Ricky.  It obviously doesn't take.  Ricky would be an awful murder suspect even in other circumstances, thanks to being such a normally belligerent adolescent boy, who might badly hurt somebody in hot-blooded anger, but is simply not credible as a stalking premeditated killer.  Ricky would only "work" in these circumstances by being surprising, rather than plausible, when Angela is spending the entire movie being implosively crazy.  And not a single other red herring is even momentarily forwarded.  The only reason to ever think the killer's not Angela is that Judy lives so long.  But now we have our third plank in our Reverse Friday the 13th trifecta, an adolescent girl instead of an old woman.  Or maybe that's the converse.  Or transverse.  Or whatever.

The kills themselves sort of suck: there's creativity, and some strong attempts at gnarliness (though you can tell the MPAA is already heading into its imperial phase, or else a movie with this finale simply didn't want to push its luck), like the scalding death of the pedophile cook, about the only one that counts as on-camera; the most effectively frightful image is just the already-dead body of one of Angela's tormentors I didn't mention, dipshit male Billy (Loris Sallahian), that happens to activate my apiphobia, stung so badly by the bees still covering his face (ewww) that he kind of looks like he exploded.  It's not that these kills are so stingily-filmed that's the problem (though the need to keep the killer entirely offscreen sure presents smaller problems, which Hiltzik isn't solving); it's that basically none of them should work.  The cook's death would work if Angela just pulled the chair out from under him so he fell on the pot, but it tries to put "thrills" into this murder for some reason, so all I could think about was how he could, at any point during the conflict, jump off the chair.  Kenny (John E. Dunn), another dipshit male, is drowned under an overturned canoe, because he has placed himself precisely in this situation, for what appears to be precisely this reason; and it still probably shouldn't work.  Billy was apparently allergic to bees (Wikipedia claims this was exposited, and I do not believe them); crawling out through the very high doors in the bathroom stall he's "trapped" in with the bees might have been advisable, then.  Then we get to Meg and to Judy; as with Kenny, Sleepaway Camp is, I assume, trading on the dreaded Biological Male Strength.  But this chick?  She's got Jason Voorhees Strength, drowning an older boy, knocking Judy insensate with a pat on the head, and killing Meg by driving a knife through a wooden shower partition, and, because that's not enough, pulling the knife down through the wooden shower partition a good two feet.

This does point us towards how the movie sort of still manages to function, though: Sleepaway Camp is at least using its extremely nominal mystery about who its killer is productively—it's using it dishonorably, yes, and hugely dishonorably in regards to how it thinks your assumption that the killer is a man makes some of the above-listed violence physically possible—but it allows you to intellectually know well ahead of time that Angela is the killer, while not having to emotionally engage with it, so you can attend to her wretched adolescent slice-of-life amidst this alienating crowd of seemingly-normals.  And Sleepaway Camp does decent camp, if not great camp: one thing it is taking directly from the Friday the 13th playbook is using the slasher form to not sweat having a screenplay, leaning instead upon impressions and quasi-naturalism and go-nowhere scenes, such as works better in, well, Friday the 13th movies, though there's some uniqueness to the sheer stilted awkwardness of the snapshot of pubescent sexuality in the early 80s here, revolving around pushy boys, exultant early-bloomers, and "prudes."

It's fine, and probably gets more mileage out of Benjamin Davis's unadorned photography and just letting 80s filmstock and the sun do their mutual magic together.  (The nighttime shooting is not what you'd call atmospheric, and you might call overlit—which is perhaps a minor way it's doing Friday the 13th on opposite day.)  The bad news is that time spent with Ricky is sort of dramatically pointless, and time spent with Angela means time spent with Rose's performance, which I would refrain from calling either good or bad, but I would absolutely call boring, mostly just staring blankly at shit.  I will, even though it's not very fair of me, also express disappointment that they hired someone with two X chromosomes and just a slightly large mandible, because now I can't call it challenging, or brave, or even a make-up & hairstyling success.  (Though her hairstyle could not, under any paradigm, be deemed a success.)

You'll find no quarter here.

But this gets us to the tricky part.  So Angela turns out to be Peter, a boy with his dead sister's name, or a girl who's had girlhood foisted upon her, or whatever, but in any event sure does have a (prosthetic) wiener, and I... don't know what the movie is doing with it.  (It obviously does not have a clear bead on Angela.)  I want to believe it wasn't just Hiltzik mashing Friday the 13th and Psycho together.  I think if we force it a little, we do get to an idea about how boys are so fucking mean to girls and girls are so fucking mean to each other that a boy could not handle it, and would just go axe-crazy.  And that's probably the level at which it makes the most sense.  There's something about gayness—that is, men attracted to men—when we discover that Angela and Peter had two dads, and whatever this is, I get every impression that it's very nice, but it's so inarticulate and mumbled I don't know what it is exactly, except possibly there's a message here about why you should let widowed gay men adopt their partner's children, because otherwise they will be, I guess, transed by their crazy aunts.  Or it has to do with the little romance I described between Angela and Paul, and it's trying to say something about the distinction between gayness and femininity and that gay boys aren't girls; maybe the movie makes more sense in the original Farsi.  But there's something, and I wouldn't blame you if you found it actively fascinating in its very unwillingness to cohere; I mean, I complained about how offscreen the deaths are in this slasher, but the last one actually is better for it, for not letting us know exactly how it happened, and thereby putting in that ellipsis a whole hell of a lot of ambiguity that represents, in a movie consistently falling short of even its most modest ambitions, some honest-to-goodness art.

Killer: Angela, né (possibly née, don't get mad at me) Peter

Final Girl: Paul, I guess

Best Kill: Billy, in the crapper, with the bees

Sign of the Times: That the fucking movie even exists, man; alternatively, the bitchin', dark irony-soaked synth-rock song over the end credits courtesy Frankie Vinci

Scariest Moment: The final shot, where Rose "staring blankly at shit" finally gives way to staring at shit with furious purpose; alternatively, trying to come up with a fun review title that wasn't blatantly transphobic

Weirdest Moment: Since I habitually make this more about playing at perversity, I suppose it's when Meg starts openly boasting about her gerontophilia; at a minimum, Mel has every right to be so upset when she dies, she's a rare bird

Champion Dialogue: "Eat shit and live, Bill."

Body Count: 12

1. Dad John and

2. Angela Original Recipe are killed by a motorboat

3. Artie the pedo cook tastes the soup

4. Kenny apparently decides to inhale when Angela pushes his head under the water

5. Billy, Irwin Allened to death

6. Meg is clearly killed by a visitor wandering over from Crystal Lake, I mean for fuck's sake

7. Judy is tormented with a (phallic?) curling iron

8. Mel is shot with an arrow

9-approx. 11: four random-ass kids are butchered in their sleeping bags with an axe

12. Paul is beheaded

TL;DR: Bad at slashing, bad at just being a movie, and frankly baffling at gender—so at least it's interesting, and some might say that this is better than being merely middlingly good, which was probably the theoretical ceiling here anyway.

Score: 5/10

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1957) The Amaizing Colossal Man (1957) Journey To the Center of the Earth (1959)

2023: Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)