After a father and one of his young children are killed in a freak boating accident, the surviving child is sent to live with kooky Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould). Cut to eight years later, and Angela (Felissa Rose) is growing into a problem teenager, uncomfortable in her own skin and almost mute with shyness. Shipped off for the summer to Camp Arawak with her protective cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten), Angela has to endure the unwanted attentions of sleazy chef Artie (Owen Hughes), the bullying of counsellor Meg (Katherine Kemhi) and vicious teasing from bitchy Judy (Karen Fields) and the other children. As Angela begins to come out of her shell, and has her first awkward experiences of love with Ricky’s friend Paul (Christopher Collet), children and staff at the camp start dying one by one at the hands of a mysterious and inventive killer.
If you were to create a map of movie massacres, its most popular sites would inevitably be Crystal Lake and Elm Street – but even if Camp Arawak, also from a horror franchise launched in the eighties, has been visited less often than these locations, sometimes, as any camper can tell you, it is necessary to venture a little off the beaten track in order to find the best spot. The point-of-view killings in ‘Sleepaway Camp’ might recall the earlier Halloween, and its creative slice-and-dice (murder weapons include a cooking vat, a curling iron, and even a swarm of bees) might be pure ‘Friday the Thirteenth’, but where those movies were all about co-ed carnage and the punishment of rampant sexuality, Robert Hiltzik’s film explores the more virgin territory of early teens caught up in that difficult time of transition when sexuality has still not properly defined itself. There may be gory corpses aplenty in ‘Sleepaway Camp’, but its real horror derives from the bodies of those still living, as burgeoning hormones and developing desires bring to the surface all manner of anxieties about that most confusing and often unpleasant of phases, adolescence, when the innocence of childhood starts irrevocably to recede.
The identity of the killer in ‘Sleepaway Camp’ is pretty obvious from early on – so obvious, in fact, that you might even convince yourself for some time that the person in question can only be a red herring – but this is not ultimately a whodunnit so much as a whydunnit, and the Argento-esque twist in its tail is truly satisfying, offering a solution which is difficult to see coming but still makes perfect sense, and will leave you wanting to watch the film all over again.