Sleepaway Camp III is pretty much the epitome of slasher comfort food: plus, you pretty much WANT everybody in this movie to die, anyway!
Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland is a fantastic little horror-comedy that succeeds on both fronts — which, as we all know by now, isn’t exactly the easiest thing for a movie to do.
I guess the immediate question is whether part III is as good as the first two movies. It’s subjective, of course, but I’d contend that even as the weakest of the original trilogy, it’s still an immensely enjoyable and entertaining slasher spoof that’s way better than 85 percent of the “pure” slasher movies we got in the 1980s. It still works wonderfully today and you can’t help but admire the commitment to minimalism on display.
OK, so Sleepaway Camp III kinda fudges with the franchise canon a little. Somehow, someway Angela (played by the incredibly underrated Pamela Springsteen) got away with mass murdering like 40 people at a summer camp so she does what any wanted fugitive would do … she literally goes back to the same summer camp, where not even the police recognize her, for whatever reason.
The movie takes an incredible suspension of belief to work, but come on, this movie is basically a live-action cartoon as it is. All of the characters are horrific and horrible people — save one or two, maybe — and you CAN’T wait to see them get their comeuppance. Sleepaway Camp III, like the very first Friday the 13th movie, becomes something of a morality play, the last gasp of Reagan-era Moral Majoritarian “family values” terror. If you do drugs, have premarital sex, cheat on your wife, curse too much, refuse to recycle or spray paint property that doesn’t belong to you, Angela will kill you and make it immensely painful.
One of the things I like about Sleepaway Camp III is that it quickly posits Angela as an equal opportunity slasher. Yeah, she’ll kill the Black dude at camp who listens to rap music and pulls guns on people, but she’ll also gladly dispatch the snobby, racist girl from Dunwoody, Georgia for being a bigot. And just WAIT until you see what she does to the Young Republican sex fiend — man, wouldn’t it be a blast to see Angela infiltrate a CPAC convention in the next Sleepaway Camp movie?
The cast of characters in Sleepaway Camp III is great. Even though they’re mostly one-dimensional stereotypes, at least they’re given more personality than in most films of its ilk. Even the canon fodder juvenile delinquents destined for dismemberment show off some quirky traits before they get bludgeoned to death with hammers. Or have their heads blown off with fireworks. Or get tree limbs jammed through their … well, you get the idea
I really loved the premise of the movie. You’ve got two wannabe humanitarians who are obviously conniving con-artists opening an all inclusive camp for children from wealthy families and at-risk youth from marginalized communities and the punchline is that all of them are awful human beings, albeit in different ways and for different reasons. It’s a cynical movie at heart, but I don’t think a film called Sleepaway Camp III is really *meant* to be interpreted as true social commentary. This movie is all about people getting mulched to death by lawnmowers and dropped face first from flagpoles until their cranial contents spill all over the earth like piñata candy. Forgive me if I don’t give it the same level of philosophical reverence that I would give Hoop Dreams or The Thin Blue Line.
Everybody’s gonna have their favorite moment from the film. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the sequence where Angela mixes up a batch of insecticide and rat poison and tells a reporter that it’s grade A cocaine — the “sizzling” sound of her brain after snorting it is nothing short of fabulous. Of course, watching Pam beat Michael J. Pollard to death with a tree limb is pretty entertaining, as well. And that final shot of the movie, when two paramedics at least contemplate giving Angela a fatal overdose of whatever in the back of an ambulance — just beautiful.
It’s pretty weird that this movie came out in 1989, when we got new entries for Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. I’d contend that Sleepaway Camp III is better than all of them, and by a pretty sizable margin, too. It’s such a “back to basics” kind of movie and it just plain works; it’s the simple story of a 110-pound woman butchering everybody who slights her in horrific ways, with an awesomely crappy heavy metal soundtrack layered atop all of the mayhem. It’s formulaic, certainly, but at the same time it has so much charm and idiosyncratic humor. It’s a funny movie, but more importantly, it’s a fun movie that doesn’t even try to get all righteous and self-important on us. If it is a step-down from its predecessors, it’s a very mild one. And Sleepaway Camp at its theoretical “worst” is still better than most horror series at their absolute apogee.
It’s a crude and crass movie and no, some of the jokes don’t hold up all that well — i.e., that line about “nobody” listening to rap music anymore. But as long as you don’t take this film far more seriously than you should, I think you’ll have a heck of a time watching or re-watching this one.
It’s amazing what you can do with a story that’s essentially just “jerks in the woods get killed for being such jerks in the first place.” In that regard, substance can easily take a backseat to style when the overall execution — and I mean that in more ways than just one — is as good as it is in Sleepaway Camp III.
