Angela Baker, the evangelical, homicidal transvestite daughter of Robert Mitchum’s character, Harry Powell, in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter returns to make “a papacy slew me,” “a calm sappy ewe,” and “a lamas weepy pc,” the only anagrams for the film’s title which I came up with that I found remotely humorous while waiting for Michael Simpson’s cinematic tripe to end.
Another serial killer (Pamela Springsteen) is loose in the woods, plaguing the kids at camp.
That’s all the plot credit that Simpson’s film deserves because, like his previous outing with Sleepaway Camp II, he does nothing outside of contribute to the vast canon of hackneyed horror for which the genre is perpetually attempting to disassociate itself.
The opening scene serves as an apt metaphor for Simpson’s work (a.k.a. half-assed effort) as a whole. We are greeted with requisite blood and nudity but unlike the stigmatic stereotype the genre carries with it, Randi Layne, our first fatality, doesn’t house the standard endowments of a female horror victim, thus signaling that Simpson’s film isn’t even going to make the cut as standard horror fare as he pours salt into his own wound by accentuating the sad fact by focusing on Layne’s breasts, which have “milk” and “shake” coyly tattooed above each mosquito bite. Yet, to make sure that his audience is aware of the caliber of throwaway celluloid we are about to be tormented with, seconds before the opening credits roll the Camp New Horizons van floods the screen, complete with makeshift logo, which makes the magnetic “Student Driver” decals seen on the streets every summer look like professional paint jobs.
However, Simpson creates a venue in which to posit social commentary in his “experiment in sharing” (this reviewer wishes he hadn’t) at Camp New Horizons, where inner city kids are placed alongside rich snobs in order to eradicate the thin line that separates the classes. How well does the director succeed? Well, it permits him to bombard us with a crew of barely legible, offensive typecasts including Cindy (Kim Wall), a WASP debutant who mutters “nigger” several times; an Asian named Greg (Chung Yen Tsay) who tosses firecrackers left and right; Riff (Daryl Wilcher), the token black guy who listens to rap and carries a gun; the camp’s fifty-something proprietors Herman (Michael Pollard) and Lily (Herman Sandra Dorsey), the latter’s ability to sit on her ass resulting in the former’s libido preying upon the camp slut, Jan (Stacie Lambert); Bobby (Haynes Brooke), the horny shy guy with–what’s else?–political aspirations; tagger burn-out (apparently from the fumes of his Krylon cans) Snowboy (Kyle Holman); the never-do-wrong by the name of Marcia (Tracy Griffith) who will obviously see the end of the film along with Tony (Mark Oliver), an East Los Angeles hood who finds it within himself to rise above his lower-class upbringing to save Marcia to have her–shucky darn–disclose that she’s merely been enjoying an “on the side” and that she has a boyfriend back home yet he is welcome to come see her whenever he wants.
Would it be a surprise to anyone to learn that girls too old to be cast as teenagers never wear bras and enjoy one another’s company in topless Bacchanalian freedom?
Oh, by the way, screenwriter Fritz Gordon “cleverly” (wink wink, nod nod) named his characters after those in West Side Story, The Brady Bunch, and The Munsters; has Angela yank the Jason mask from the previous installment in the series out of the lake on none other than–drum roll–Saturday the 14th; and wryly places the address of the Thompson house in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street on the license plate of a garbage truck, the latter of which I almost missed between glances at the screen and a wicked hangnail I’d been working on for most of the day.
The only thing of interest in the film is that fact that Sleepaway Camp III was shot back-to-back with its forerunner yet Pamela Springsteen seems to have aged ten years between productions. Boorishly, instead of attempting to divert the half-awake viewer from the overly distracting fact, Simpson brings attention to the visual impediment by not only citing how old her character looks for a camper on three separate occasions during the production, but casts her as an eighteen year-old.
I don’t think I need to recap my opinions of Michael Simpson’s two contributions to the Sleepaway Camp series. All that can and needs to be said it that, via genre protocol, the director issues two gratuitous sequels which dilute the originality and power of their paterfamilias. The only positive note to all this is that Simpson quit making films shortly after Sleepaway Camp III. Let’s hope he doesn’t second-guess his retirement.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
