I could've sworn I had reviewed Sleepaway Camp (1983) before on this blog, but apparently not. In fact, Sleepaway Camp is one of the movies that inspired me to start this project - I watched it while emailing a friend who was also watching it, and neither of us could believe what we were seeing. It also has the distinction of being the movie that introduced me to the podcast How Did This Get Made, which is truly hilarious and dedicated to those misbegotten movies we love to hate (or hate to love?).
Sleepaway Camp is a cult classic that has a lot of gender identity subtext - so much so that it seems ahead of its time, looking back from 2015. The surface plot is about a horrible water-skiing accident (how many movies can claim that?!) that fractures a family - then we are finally introduced to our protagonists, young Ricky and his cousin Angela. Angela is being sent to summer camp for what seems like the first time, and Ricky is very protective of her; she is shy to the point of simply silently staring at people when they speak to her. This leads to moments of complete exasperation/bullying by the other campers, who scream "WHY ARE YOU SO F*&@ED UP, ANGELA?!" right into her face.
Well, like any teen slasher worth its salt people start dying almost immediately, in quite gruesome ways. One horrible child sex predator is boiled alive; another camper is killed by bees while taking "a wicked dump" (his words). There are plenty of awful deaths. Fun fact: the camp cook (who survives!) is Robert Earl Jones, the father of James Earl Jones. His voice sounds EXACTLY the same - they are dead ringers vocally.
Sleepaway Camp is notable mostly for the famous (and tremendously shocking) twist ending. I am very very tempted to spoil it here, but it really should be seen at least once without any warning. The movie has been a cult classic for years primarily for that final moment, which really raises more questions than it answers, and makes you question a number of previous events. As mentioned earlier, there is a lot of strange gender commentary going on here; I'm not sure at all what the director is trying to say (and I'm not sure HE knew), but something unusual is being said, that's for sure.
Sleepaway Camp was the brainchild of Robert Hiltzik, who wrote and directed it. He is a lawyer in New York, apparently, and his only other movie is .... Return to Sleepaway Camp (2008), which I saw, to my infinite regret, and can say with complete confidence that it's a 0/10 (hell, 0/100 or 0/1,000,000) movie that has absolutely no entertainment value of any kind, has an abysmal script, abysmal acting, and is surely being screened in Hell right now. A truly awful movie. There were two others in the series that he didn't have a hand in, and they are really only loosely related - Sleepaway Camp 2 and Sleepaway Camp 3 both star Bruce Springsteen's younger sister Pamela (!!!) as Angela, come back to murder more campers for bizarre and poorly expressed reasons. They aren't the worst, but are best avoided. The fourth movie is truly dreck and you would do well to forget I ever mentioned it.
It was made in upstate New York for about $350,000. According to IMDB, it pulled it $430,000 during its opening weekend (not bad!) and ultimate claimed $11,000,000 - a very tidy sum for Mr. Hiltzik. It's well worth watching, at least once, and especially if you're interested in the teen slasher genre.
Gimme an F (1984) is an odd duck. It's a teen dance/sex romp, like so many before it and after it, but it has a surprisingly tender heart to it - it seems to really like its characters, and wish the best for them - unusual for this genre. A group of poor, ill-equipped, undertalented cheerleader misfits attempt to make it big, going up against well-funded, well-trained squads. Also released as "T & A Academy 2" (classy) and "Cheerballs" (in West Germany).
This is also a camp movie - but a dance camp, and no one is murdered. Instead, a number of people get laid, but the film is surprisingly coy with the sexual tension, and almost everything is implied and hinted at rather than shoved in your gob. It's strange, because on one hand it's nice to have a movie tease you and force you to use your imagination (ah, the good old days) and actually stay relatively tasteful ... but on the other hand, it has a really difficult time keeping up tension compared to its high-octane hyper-lascivious colleagues like Private School or Cheerleader Camp. It's difficult not to be disappointed after you've had cheap and plentiful nudity shoveled at you.
The plot here is pretty old - camp owner Bucky Berkshire (!) bets his top instructor ten grand that the instructor can't turn the hapless Ducks (the poor squad mentioned above) into a winner. Instructor takes the bet, not knowing that Bucky has an ulterior motive - Japanese businessmen will only invest in Bucky's schemes if the top instructor is on board. Why do so many '80s movies feature Japanese businessmen taking over companies (most notably in Gung Ho (1986))?? I don't remember that actually being a real trend - did the Japanese take over a ton of American companies that I'm not aware of?
Anyway, the movie features some half-decent dance sequences and some of the usual sex antics found in camp sex comedies - for example, one couple doing the deed is secretly broadcast over the loudspeaker without being aware of it. I'd already seen that joke used in M*A*S*H, and I'm sure it was fairly old even then. But that's about the temperature of things - hijinks, but low-grade hijinks.
There is one really great scene where the top instructor does a solo dance in what looks like a sauna, really high energy and athletic.
Gimme an F was written by James Hart, his first movie - he went on to write the screenplay for Hook, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Muppet Treasure Island, Contact, Tuck Everlasting, and more. It was directed by Paul Justman, who is mostly known for music documentaries about bands from the '60s and '70s (Deep Purple, Cream, The Doors, Diana Ross, etc.). He also contributed a song to the soundtrack of this movie and to the soundtrack of The Sure Thing (1985), which is pretty interesting. I can't find financial info for this movie anywhere, so I can' report on its success; but I'm going to guess it probably was made fairly cheaply and probably ultimately broke even.
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