I think I'm starting to lose my taste for horror movies. For about the last ten years, horror has been a favorite genre for me, especially the old 80s slasher movies. I even enjoyed watching the bad ones, because it is so entertaining to see what kinds of new and interesting ways they come up with for killing promiscuous teenagers. But the whole Sleepaway Camp series struck me as so witless and boring that my only conclusion is that it must either be a prodigious disaster six movies long or I am just not into this crap anymore.
The second sequel is not even as good as the first sequel, which in its entirety is not even as good as the last shot of the original film. Once again, the acting is astonishingly bad from beginning to end, and they knew this too. Notice, after all, that there is a teenage girl wearing nothing but panties less than a minute after the film starts (with "Milk Shake" tattooed across her breasts, if you can believe that), then another one 15 minutes later, and rarely do you have to wait that long for the rest of the movie to see some bare breasted girl trying to act like it's perfectly normal for her to be hanging around half naked at camp.
Maybe it's because I worked at a summer camp a couple years ago and so I know how ridiculous the idea of Camp New Horizons is. The big idea this time is to take a lot of poor kids and put them in camp with a bunch of rich kids for an "experience in sharing." The result is a lot of ridiculous caricatures the likes of which would never survive in the real world, rich or poor (Snowboy???).
As far as the motives behind the killings, one of the things that I first appreciated about good slasher movies (even the good 'bad' slasher movies) was that there was always a reason the people were killed. It almost always had something to do with promiscuity or drugs or alcohol or something, but the audience was allowed some opportunity to figure it out. Not here. All subtlety is removed and replaced with a completely mechanical removal of undesirables ("Are you a cheerleader?" "Yes." "Are you a virgin?" "No." "Have you ever done drugs?" "Yes." "Strike three...").
Admittedly, some of the death scenes are certainly original, like the kid who gets his arms pulled off by the jeep and the girl who gets pulled up the flagpole and then dropped. I hadn't seen that before. But then you have ones that are creative but that just don't work, like the kid who doesn't wake up as a lit firecracker is pushed up his nose.
All in all, the first film is worth watching just for that ending, which is thematically disturbing but highly effective. Part 2 and 3, however, both have yawn-inducing endings, and personally I have no interest in finding out about parts 4, 5, or 6....
The second sequel is not even as good as the first sequel, which in its entirety is not even as good as the last shot of the original film. Once again, the acting is astonishingly bad from beginning to end, and they knew this too. Notice, after all, that there is a teenage girl wearing nothing but panties less than a minute after the film starts (with "Milk Shake" tattooed across her breasts, if you can believe that), then another one 15 minutes later, and rarely do you have to wait that long for the rest of the movie to see some bare breasted girl trying to act like it's perfectly normal for her to be hanging around half naked at camp.
Maybe it's because I worked at a summer camp a couple years ago and so I know how ridiculous the idea of Camp New Horizons is. The big idea this time is to take a lot of poor kids and put them in camp with a bunch of rich kids for an "experience in sharing." The result is a lot of ridiculous caricatures the likes of which would never survive in the real world, rich or poor (Snowboy???).
As far as the motives behind the killings, one of the things that I first appreciated about good slasher movies (even the good 'bad' slasher movies) was that there was always a reason the people were killed. It almost always had something to do with promiscuity or drugs or alcohol or something, but the audience was allowed some opportunity to figure it out. Not here. All subtlety is removed and replaced with a completely mechanical removal of undesirables ("Are you a cheerleader?" "Yes." "Are you a virgin?" "No." "Have you ever done drugs?" "Yes." "Strike three...").
Admittedly, some of the death scenes are certainly original, like the kid who gets his arms pulled off by the jeep and the girl who gets pulled up the flagpole and then dropped. I hadn't seen that before. But then you have ones that are creative but that just don't work, like the kid who doesn't wake up as a lit firecracker is pushed up his nose.
All in all, the first film is worth watching just for that ending, which is thematically disturbing but highly effective. Part 2 and 3, however, both have yawn-inducing endings, and personally I have no interest in finding out about parts 4, 5, or 6....