Sleepaway Camp

Ok, I have a lot of things to say about this movie and a lot of conflicting feelings. First, off I want to say that I actually do enjoy this movie and love the huge twist at the end (warning: major spoilers ahead like all my revies). Let me go through what I really enjoyed about the movie before getting into what I didn't like so much or things that didn't age well (remember, this movie was made in 1983). I appreciated that this movie wanted a decent amount of shock factor for the audience. It wasn't just ooooooo spooky slasher just coming into a camp and doing sort of mundane kills. No, first kill is dude get boiling water spills all over them and the way they did the blistering for the 80 special fx capacity was really good. Then they have the kill of the dude being murdered by bees (I really don't think that would happen in real life, but hey, it's a movieeee). I loved the bees crawling all over the corpse. Then one kill that I was surprised to be entertained by was when Meg was not only sufficated by a pillow, but was then assaulted by her curling iron (or heavily implies) was just horrific without showing too much. Alight...let's get into that ending scene which was the big twist of the movie. Let's pretend we are in the 80s and trans rights were not under attack like they are now and the trans community is not as it is today. Without the trans politicism in place, I loveeeeee the twist. This whole time we though Angela was the sole survivor of the boating accident that we though took her brother and dad away. However, it is revealed that crazyyyyy Aunt Martha (or whatever her name was) had actually taken in the brother (who ACTUALLY survived the accident) and had made him into a girl because she already had a boy (I guess????). I mean it explains the amount of trauma this person went through and the psychotic break she had. However, this painted a really bad picture for trans individuals even though the main character was not trans but was forced to be another gender against their will. Again, we did not know that we would be facing the issues with the trans community as we do now, but the trans community has already existed, and this just made that community more ostracized in a way. Besides that, the only other thing I didn't like was the dude in the kitchen just being a straight up pedophile. I mean the owner was basically one too but I think that element was added to just add to the yuck factor of the movie. This movie is just ridiculous, however, it sticks with me and damn, that ending scene where we see "Angela" nude with body parts the audience was convinced weren't there is just so creeeeeepy in just that her mouth is just caping open. Honestly, one of the creepiest endings to a movie. 

Prime rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My rating: 4.1 out of 5 stars (this is pretty high for someone who doesn't really like 80s teen camp slashers! This movie just offered a lot)