Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers

A few years after the notorious events at Camp Arawak, Angela has been "rehabilitated" (along with an official sex change to female), or so it seems, and has become a camp counselor at Camp Rolling Hills. Changing her last name to Johnson, Angela has hidden that past from Uncle John, director of the camp, but her homicidal tendencies remain intact. The girls and others in the camp will learn this all too well.
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The Angela of Sleepaway Camp 2 needs very little to set her off. Pamela Springsteen doesn’t exactly carry an intimidating presence and her face and demeanor never really raise far from the look of a disapproving parent scolding her children, sometimes smilingly oblivious to what her psychotic episodes truly leave behind…the carnage and homicidal results leave quite the body trail. Camp Rolling Hills is Angela’s new area of slaughter. This time she’s happy-go-lucky and “morals are essential” in regards to proper behavior of her campers. If you just slightly annoy her, though--like smoking week or gulping beer or showing your tits gleefully for the boys in the nearby cabins, or insist on leaving camp because of rules and regulations that deter the enjoyment that comes with freedom away from parents--bloodshed awaits. Angela simply doesn’t tolerate talking back or misbehaving as a means to antagonize her set principles of managing her camp of girls. This is all about taking fun jabs at slasher conventions. The cheerleader seeking as much attention as possible; she sleeps nude, doesn’t mind walking around with her breasts exposed, has a filthy mouth, and defies authority. We know her type of character in the slasher genre is dead meat. Valerie Hartman played her, the name of Ally. Her demise puts a new spin on “washing your mouth out.” The hot cheerleader with the foul mouth and uninhibited nature…yeah, this kind of character typically dies in the worst possible way.

By the end of Sleepaway Camp 2, I just rolled my eyes at all this stupid nonsense. Stupid is as stupid does, and I’m not about to believe that Angela could wipe out an entire camp of people without any resistance at all except final girl Molly (Renee Esteves) cutting her a couple times with a pocket knife. That implausibility will be (and continues to be) celebrated. This is undeniably a Saturday night slasher favorite, quotable and cheered, but for fuck sake is it contrived. The girls continue to be “sent home” yet the boss of the camp, Uncle John, isn’t suspicious. Sure, people love the fact that Angela seems to start killing without a sense of reasoning behind her psychotic episodes. By the end, she kills a girl with a guitar wire just because she won’t shut up! Okay, that is funny, but still it gets more than a little ludicrous. A girl walks in as Angela attempts to dispose of the previously mentioned motormouth and she gets immediately stabbed in the chest. By the end, no one’s left except Molly because she happens to slip off the edge of a rock formation, rendered unconscious by a boulder or two on the ground below, with Angela lamenting, “Well, if it’s any consolation, you almost made it.” Yeah, the only person she likes, she mocks. That’s the point. Angela is an anti-hero because she’s lost her scruples (never had them much during her life), comments happily after each kill with a zinger or two about those she dispatches, and gets her way until the end, seemingly capable of a complete massacre, with Molly awakening, walking into a road in a daze, and meeting the driver of a truck who might offer her a ride and assistance who just so happens to be the one she’s trying to escape from.

I realize I’m perhaps on the wrong side, because this is seen as a certain type of slasher fan’s dream come true. It dispenses with any logic in favor of a high body count and a killer with plenty of diabolical quips. That’s enough, I realize, for many, but after a while I just give up on something like this if there’s nothing of further value. Am I a fuddy-duddy? I guess, but at the very least present obstacles that might confront Angela, interfering with her killing everybody. It’s absurd to think she can kill one after another without fail; even Molly isn’t worth a shit when it comes to defense against such a monster. Yay! Hip hip hooray, Angela kills everybody! I guess I’m supposed to cheer her, too, but I preferred someone giving her a taste of her own medicine. It bothers me when someone like her can kill and kill without repercussions, but that’s part of this slasher sequel’s appeal…we love this psycho, she’s so much fun, and we want to see her again! Well, the movie gives her a return in the even worse part 3.

To this film’s credit, there’s quite a “gathering of bodies” scene, where many of Angela’s destroyed corpses are presented to us, set up as if a seated congregation inside an abandoned cabin she likes to revisit from time to time to “gather her thoughts”. Molly and her beau, Sean, find themselves tied up, with Angela awaiting a fellow camp counselor, TJ (Brian Patrick Clarke, with build, mullet, and easy-going nature, but he’s eventually tired of Angela’s exhausting “we must behave and not do anything naughty” moral uppity personality) to arrive to their rescue so she can toss battery acid (from his vehicle no less; this to add insult to his serious injury) in his face. Oh yeah, Angela is plenty willing to kill in any manner of ways. Burn twins alive because they smoke pot, toss a slutty cheerleader (who purposely provokes Angela to anger because she just likes being a bitch) into an outhouse shit hole (where leeches along with excrement and piss await her) while drowning her in it with a tree stick, chop a victim’s head off (later placing it in a broken television!), slices a throat with the finger blade of a mock Freddy Krueger glove, chainsaw into a dude disguised as Jason Voorhees, drill into a noisy girl insisting she be taken home, and tending to two voyeuristic boys with a Polaroid camera (found by another counselor who herself is stabbed repeatedly upon finding two victims in Uncle John’s office). The body count is rather high--as I’m sure has been documented aplenty in the past--and the script is dutifully filled with characters that remain slasher genre mainstays (the virginal innocent (Esteves), the hot bitch (Hartman), the final girl’s camp boyfriend (Tony Higgins) whose father helped arrest Angela, backtalking Mare (Susan Snyder), talkative and too investigative Demi (Kendall Bean), etc.) certain to be targets of the film’s killer. There’s the chase scene where the camera follows Angela as she pursues frightened Molly --that is right out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre-- through the woods. Surprisingly the only weapon that seems left out of Angela’s killing spree is the very available machete (carried by the kid dressed as Jason).

Spending a whole lot of time on a film I felt very little for seems tasking so I will conclude by saying that Hartman’s demise is about as horrifying as any slasher (regardless of seriousness) I can remember, and she has a really convincing bit of softcore sex with a lucky guy from a male camp (ran by TC) out in the woods that could be considered a showstopper; Hartman, to me, had two of the most memorable scenes. Pamela Springsteen is held out as the star of this; she performs with tongue-in-cheek, understanding the material calls for her to give her lines a demented twinkle and a wicked savour, winking at us that this shouldn’t be looked at with any sort of seriousness. Saying all of that, I guess it would be questioned then why I cast such a criticism towards it if we are supposed to laugh at it all. I think I can laugh at this if there was just a bit of realism attached to this. But by film’s end, it was so dumb and idiotic, that I couldn’t swallow its malarkey. We’re expected to accept that Angela would just so happen to drive up as Molly exits the woods, the one person who could escape from the overall massacre, and all so that the anti-hero can successfully kill the entire Camp Rolling Hills roster. That’s a massive-sized pill I have trouble swallowing.

Okay, so maybe I will concede and say that the film belies all in favor of serving up the victims to Pamela as she walks away with the picture merrily a slaying with sheer delight, enjoying the power at her disposal because those that invoke her psychotic outbursts are too easy a target not to perish in ways she sees fit. There’s the scene where she urgently seeks the right weapon to kill blabbermouth, settling on the guitar wire, garroting her from behind, deciding the drill would be nice when her victim pronounces, “Whattya looking for, a gun?” (“No, a drill.”), telling Molly that her Sean is “on TV!” (his severed head, that is), and deciding to lash out on Uncle John and his accompaniment for firing her (she did “send home” her entire cabin of girls!). The effects are often quite good, and as I mentioned, the scene where all the murdered bodies are shown is rather unsettling even as the tone and material is to be taken with a grain of salt. I can see why it is beloved, I just don’t love it. It is a shining example of the video rental 80s slasher film, now a bit more difficult to find (due to the DVD being out of print), a hit in its day and still remains a favorite among many.

Valerie Hartman...in the flesh