Sleepaway Camp (DVD)

Saw this originally back in 1985, at the height of the stalk and slash craze started by Friday 13th. It is a familiar story, set in a US holiday camp for young people, and centres around young Angela, a shy girl who is bullied by the more dominant kids there. I am not spoiling anything by saying one by one her campmates come to sticky ends in some quite inventive murders for the time, including death by hair-curler - a first as far as I know! The film is well shot, giving a creepy atmosphere that is soeley lacking in most filme of this type. The sexual subtexts in the script and storyline made the film ahead of its time in that aspect. ...  Read the complete review

'Sleepaway Camp' stands out not only as one of slasher genre's best, but also as a great film in its own right. Although admittedly, there are an overabundance of summer camp-set hack and slash flicks, this film is an archetypal example of what made these films so wonderful in the first place, capturing and distilling their appeal into approximately 88 minutes. It has everything that the horror fan could ever want: plenty of gore, plenty of sex, and one of the best shock endings in film history. Free from the cynical irony, which has rejuvenated the genre in recent years, 'Sleepaway Camp' is oddly innocent in its sheer simplicity and lack of ...  Read the complete review

Made in 1983 at the height of the slasher film craze, and spwaned two sequels both in 1988, it revolves around a killer at a kids camp next to a lake....wait a minute I recognise that plot. The direction is bad and the acting is the worst I have ever seen not surprising that most of the acotrs and actresses in the film only went on to appear in one or two more motion pictures. At the start we see a family consisting of two kids and a dad swimming in a lake, the dad and one of the kids are killed when a young couple in a speed boat hit them, next thing we see is a mother packing off two kids to camp years later. One of these kids is Angela (Felissa Rose) and the ...  Read the complete review