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Sleepaway Camp

Sleepaway Camp

List Price: $19.98
Your Price: $17.98
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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Nasty Little Shocker with unforgettable chilling ending!
Review: great horror films are great when they can take something that is done to death: in this case slasher movie and create something different and memorable.In this case the director, has taken the hokiest horror movie cliche, mad killer at the summer camp and created a horror classic! Ricky and his very quiet cousin Angela
decide to go to summer Camp and soon regret it as the kids there are targeted by a brutal killer! The director,Robert Hiltzik has created a low-budget nasty little shocker that explores the themes of homosexuality child abuse and abnormal behavior.Now stir in some gruesome murders, and last but not least unforgettable ending and you recipe for horror classic guarantee to chill the blood! The ending alone is worth price of admission because spotting the killer isn't that hard but the killer's secret(Oh boy what a secret is it)is what makes the film so memorable.This film also is quite controversial because most of the victims are preteens and the methods of their demise isn't for the squemish.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Awesome 80's slasher fun
Review: I remember hearing about this movie in high school, but never saw it thinking it was another Friday the 13th clone. Recently i've been stockpiling 80's slasher flicks on video and i saw this one for sale so i picked it up. The movie starts out with a father and his daughter and son on a lake in a boat. Some empty headed teenagers come along in a motor boat and run over the father and one of the kids. Flash forward eight years and the two lead characters, Ricky and cousin Angela are heading off to sleepaway camp Arawak. These kids are real young in fact i was like 13 when this movie came out, so i was like they're age, and sort of could identify with the mentality. Angela is very quiet and is mocked by the other kids at the camp, but alas cousin Ricky is constantly coming to her rescue. Soon people are being knocked off, standard body count for the early 80's. Nothing really original here, but there are some weird dream sequences involving Angela to keep the movie interesting. Towards the end Angela gets thrown into the lake by an enemy. Now, this dosen't sound important, but it is when you see the ending; if you have never seen this movie i won't give the ending away but i will tell you that it is shocking to say the least, brilliant and stupid at the same time. Can you say he/she? The thick New Yawk accents cracked me up and these kids really had filthy mouths, but you will definately think of Friday the 13th, which was the standard bearer for slasher films.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: There are worse ways to spend a Friday night
Review: When I was 15, I was staying over a friend's house and this was on. I was a scaredy cat and didn't like slasher films, so I went to bed early and he stayed up and watched it. The next morning he told me about it, and I was glad I didn't watch it. 18 years later, I finally did see the whole thing and I'm glad I did.

First things first: this is not high art. If you want artsy horror, rent The Brotherhood of the Wolf. People often compare Sleepaway Camp to Friday the 13th (for the summer camp setting), but this is a different animal entirely. For one thing, Friday the 13th obviously had some semblance of a budget. This means actors. Sleepaway Camp looks as if the filmmakers went to a summer camp and cast all the people they could find. There are very few decent acting performances in Sleepaway Camp. (Felissa Rose's Angela just sits there staring with big eyes or walks with her head down; that means she's shy.)

As the story goes on, in true slasher film fashion, people are picked off one by one. Unlike many other films of the era, the victims are not innocent teens. The killings tend to be revenge motivated (until the ending when things get worse)and the bad guys are the ones on the receiving end of the violence.

There a few other little touches that render this film different from many of its ilk. For one thing, it's a slasher movie that acknowledges that homosexuality does exist (as seen in the scenes we see between Angela's father and his lover: the only bed scene in the film), and the realism of the actors (nobody looks overly made up, everybody looks like people we know) gives it a sense of immediacy. The kids at the camp are of the right age, their mouths are as foul as real kids can be, they have thick New York accents that gives this movie a sense of place, and they do more than the requisite talent show that is so prevalent in other camp horror movies. This is not a "pretty people only" movie, and that's unique.

This can backfire of course, with hilarious results. One of the main counselors is a musclebound guy who wears shorts that are so tiny that it would make anybody blush. He is topped only by another male counselor who wears cropped shirts and shorts and looks like he's auditioning for the all male, all hirsute version of "Flashdance." The main bad girl, Karen Fields, seems to think she's in an entirely different movie altogether and tries to give a performance of smoldering, evil intensity. She doesn't succeed. Instead, she ends up looking like a bad community theater cast-off with a ridiculously large side-of-the-head ponytail giving one of the worst film performances of all time. According to IMDB, she never acted again.

Unintentional humor abounds when the movie resorts to stereotyped sumemr camp movie hijinks and the boy campers are trying to get the girls to skinny dip with them. Using the old skinny dipping detail is one thing, but when you actually see the girls the boys are trying to entice, it's another thing entirely. Dear Lord.

Of course, there is the shocking, and by now, well known ending of the film. Without giving too much away, I think the filmmakers seriously screwed this moment up. The ending is abrupt and clumsy. It's a moment that lives on in memory, but the ineptness at revealing the secret gives the end a silly tone.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Summer Camp Horror...With A Twist!
Review: Sleepaway Camp is first and foremost, another summer camp slasher film. A very popular slasher subgenre originated with the 1980 classic Friday the 13th. Angela and Ricky are young teenagers off to camp Arawak for the summer, Ricky the likable popular type, and Angela, the quiet and 'different' type. When all kinds of scuzzy camp regulars begin to give Angela a hard time, they start dying rather brutally...much to the dismay of the camp's burnt out owner Mel (Mike Kellin). Sleepaway Camp is a slasher film, however, it goes a bit deeper than that, what gives Sleepaway Camp its distinction, is the bizarre homosexual themes running throughout the film. Why they are there are anybody's guess,but from the strange transvestite (?) Aunt Martha, to Angela's gay father, the truly shocking and disturbing final shot and more, Sleepaway Camp is sick, grisily, twisted, yet always fascinating. Of course, its not always great, many scenes in this film are just laughable, like the melodramatic boating accident at the film's start, or the character that wears a shirt with her name on it, and even the scenes with Chef Artie, the local camp sleazeball. Sleepaway Camp however, always manages to be charming, despite its warped themes and lurid subject matter, this one certainly isn't for everybody, but those with a taste for something not quite the norm will find much to savor here with Sleepaway Camp, a truly strange film that stands in a tired subgenre, but stands out as a unique achievement-even if partially a fluke.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: We're Gonna Go Back.......
Review: To that golden age of slasher films-The Early 80s! Every studio wanted a piece of that Friday The 13th pie. We got alot of cool movies around this time that we'd never quite see again. Disregard bad reviews, coz we're probably dealing with fans of the Slasher Flick-Wannabe-Scream generation who rented this thinking it was gonna be like Urban Legend: Final Cut. Sleepaway Camp is one of the best from the era without a doubt. Though it's a slasher flick and falls victim to slasher cliches, it actually tries for a plot, and succeeds. Not that it's deep or anything, but for a slasher film it's impressive. The killings here are very well executed(no pun intended). It's not numerous impalements with farm and garden equipment, but a bunch of accidents that befall anyone who teases and taunts our little heroine, Angela. These are pretty gruesome, especially the death by bees which is actually pretty disturbing. The scenes of jerky kids teasing this girl are also strong; They really make you want to jump into the film and pound the snot out of them. In fact, you just can't wait till they die, but ironically the killings are so brutal you begin to wonder if they really deserved it. And who can forget the ending? Very well done. Not without it's flaws(mainly some corny acting), but very well done for the genre.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Slow but rewarding horror experience
Review: Sleepaway Camp is quiet a box of two jacks, and you have to actually sit through the whole thing in order to appreciate the true scary value of it. The movie is full of flaws, one of them being the plot, which is filled with more holes than a Vietnam corpse, and the undeniably bad script that plagued and marred down the only few solid performances of the actors. Angela was pretty believable as the "incredibly shy" girl, as well as her "cousin". Of course, the girl who constantly pesters Angela is annoying to the point of wanting her to be killed as soon as possible, not only because of her "overacting soap opera", but because the script makes her even worse.

The problem with the plot is that it's based on a premise too absurd to be believable. Mysterious deaths are happening on Sleepaway Camp, a summer camp for teens. Does it sound familiar? Well, you would be surprised, this is not a standard Friday the 13th clone. In fact, there are many differences, one of them being that Sleepaway Camp lacks the atmosphere, creepy music and dark tone of the aforementioned classic, and besides, there are much more teens in this one because this is actually a true "summer camp", and not a "in the process of restoring" one like Friday the 13th. Second, like I said, deaths are happening... A boy gets killed by a swarm of wasps, another boy is drown to death, and a girl is brutally stabbed in the bathroom. Guess what?? The manager of the camp is little worried about this and the camp is barely investigated by the police and everything keeps going as if nothing had happened. It's pretty unbeliavable , I know, and the pace of the film is pretty slow, not to mention it fails to create any suspense, with the music factor not helping neither.

Then why, you will ask, am I recommending this little slasher flick?? Simple, there are two main reasons why you should check this one out. First, as a slasher movie, the killings are the center of it. Well, the murders are pretty good and actually the scenes are done with some suspense (the only time it succeeds in doing this), one of them being a man who is burned alive with a tank of boiling water (ouch), the scene of the drowned rotten boy with a snake coming out of his mouth (insane), the bloated and eaten skin of a boy killed by hundreds of wasps, a girl stabbed in the bath and the annoying one finally meeting her finale via suffocation. The second factor is, well, a little side twist in the plot, and the only thing that keeps you interested throughout the boring majority part of the movie. A little girl is pestered by the other girls and boys because she barely talks, and is very mysterious and quiet. The girl is being seduced by the only boy who is sympathetic to her, but there is something scary in this girl that keeps you linking her to the killings, despite the fact that the movie is so obvious about identifying her as the killer, that it makes you believe she is not! Well, the ending is one of the creepiest and shocking things I've seen, it truly made my hair stand still. True spine chilling, worth seeing for that alone. One of the few mediocre horror movies that is saved by a shocking scene alone.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Sleepaway Camp - A GOOD MOVIE!
Review: Many words are used for the movie Sleepaway Camp : Trashy,Bad,Horrid,Dumb,Wierd,Crazy,& Petty. But this is a great movie! When a boat crash kills a man and his daughter the son who lives is forced to live with his aunt Martha and cosin Ricky. 8 years later they go to summer camp. The camp is Camp Arawak and is for sale. Everything starts out ok, but when the head chief, Artie is burned and must leave the murders begin. A crazed camper or employee is murdering the kids. The killer MUST be stopped before he/or she kills everyone. The back cover says:

Dear Mom and Dad, you've got to get me out of here right away! There's a crazed killer on th loose and kids are being scared to death and a girl was brutelly stabbed while takeing a shower- and no one's doing anything about it. Wait, I think I hear someone comming up b- (Ends with blood splatter) A must see for any horror movie fan of the 80s! If you don't see this movie before the others you won't know what's happening.

FOLLOWED BY: Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers AND Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland

The ending is a bit wierd and I do admit the killings are very, very interesting. Now it's on DVD so you can see it over and over again!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Sleepaway Camp
Review: Sleepaway Camp is a very interesting film.It is kind of creepy.I guess it's suppose to be like that since it's a horror movie, but it has many scenes of incest and other odd things.This adds to the story and gives it a great ending; or should I say shocking.The characters are pretty interesting some are annoying, some are loveable, and some are just plain mean.The acting is pretty sucky though.The dialogue is of course cheesy.The Aunt is either a really bad actress or suppose to act they way for the movie.Many say this is a Friday The 13th knock-off but you really can't say that.This film is fresh for being different and taking a big risk.Check it out and see what you think.Welcome to Camp Arawak, where teenage boys and girls learn to experience the joys of nature, as well as eachother.But when these happy campers begin to die in a series of horrible accidents, they discover that someone - or something - has turned their summer of fun into a vacation to dismember.Has a dark secret returned from the camp's past... or will an unspeakable horror end the season forever?From its grisly special effects to the truly shocking climax, Sleepaway Camp is no ordinary body count movie.See for yourself why this killer thriller spawned two sequels and became one of the most suprising horror hits of the 80's!(7/10)

"Nice to see a flick like this with a glimmer of originality. I said a glimmer, mind you -- enough to see, but not enough to be dazzled by it."
Cold Fusion Video Reviews
Nathan Shumate

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: What the h*** is wrong with this movie?
Review: I am a total fan of horror movies, I have probably seen a million. This is without a doubt one of the worst pieces of s**t that I have ever had the disfortune to see. I ask not only what is wrong with this movie, what is wrong with all the people that gave it good reviews? I was creeped out, not because it was scary, because it was weird and nonsensical. The only parts that geniunely scared me was any scene containing that creepy-a** mother.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Go and buy it, OR BEWARE OF ANGELA BAKER!!!
Review: I watched The whole thing, and I noticed that my BLOOD WAS ON THE FLOOR!!!!!!!!!!!
BUY IT!!! I'M WARNING YOU!!! BUY IT BEFORE YOU GET FOUND BY ANGELA BAKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


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