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[jwk94]

I recently watched Sleepaway Camp for the third time with my roommate. The movie is a cult classic with a fantastic ending and great kills. Little did i know, there are "four" sequels to the film. How bad cold they be? I thought. Turns out, they're pretty bad.

Sleepaway Camp 2

Angela's back! Well kinda. OG Angela left and now we've got Pamela Springsteen playing the character. At first, I was pretty mad about this, given how great Felissa Rose's performance was, but whatever. This time, the movie is set at a different camp about 60 miles from the original where all the murders took place. Smart, really. Better to change locations so everything that goes on is more believable.

I really don't remember much about the killings in this one, but overall I didn't enjoy the first half. After that first half, the movie starts to find its stride and sets the dark-comedy tone for the sequel. Oh, and Angela killed the son of the sheriff who arrested her in the first film. That's kinda important.

Sleepaway Camp 3

Now this movie was great. Angela returns, again, but now she really doesn't care. The cast in this film is SOOOOOO much better than Sleepaway Camp 2 (and eventually Return) that it's not even funny.

The movie starts with this underprivileged girl setting off for the bus stop to camp. As she's walking, a garbage truck comes barreling at her. Does anyone care? Nah, nobody bats an eye, says anything, or attempts to help. The girl runs like hell an ends up in an alley where the truck follows and kills her. Driving the truck was good ole Angela! Pamela Springsteen returns for this film, fully embracing the role and tone.

This time around, we're back at the original camp, except the name has changed for obvious reasons. The half the "teens" from this movie are from poverty-stricken homes, while the other half are rich kids. Angela strolls in, donning the identity of the girl (Maria??) that she killed earlier. This is gonna be great.

While everyone is doing roll-call, we see the adults. We have the owners, an old man and woman, and the sheriff that arrested her! This sets up for a pretty interesting confrontation later in the film.

Anywho, the teens split into three groups with the adults and they all go off for camping adventures in the woods. Anyway, while we're in the woods, the old man has sex with one of the campers (Angela quickly kills both of them), a racist chick calls one of the poverty kids the N word (she gets strung up on a flag pole and dropped), and the old lady is lazy so she gets burried to her neck and Angela finishes her off with a lawnmower.

Now, the sheriff is noticing that things are getting weird. So, Angela leads him and this red head (the nice girl of the movie) to somewhere, but she sprains her ankle along the way so they go to the kitchen to bandage it up. While they're in the kitchen, the nice girl finds the old woman's body. Sheriff puts two and two together, has the nice girl run to the highway and confronts Angela. The sheriff is understandably mad about his son being dead so he slowly approaches Angela. Because she's prepared, she shoots the dude in the chest and that's that.

Red head and her lover end up making it out alive after a showdown that leaves Angela "dead." However, during the ambulance ride, we see the paramedic say that Angela's still breathing. The cop who's in the ambulance says they should let her die. Well, Angela's not having any of that, so when the cop turns around, she grabs a syringe, kills the paramedic, then turns around and jabs it in the cop's eye.

Sleepaway Camp 4!!!

The movie that kinda never was. After the conclusion of Sleepaway Camp 3, they started production for Sleepaway Camp 4, except they only got 30 minutes of footage. The company who was footing the bill went bankrupt so they couldn't do anything else. The movie was more or less canceled. The 30 mins of footage was released on the special edition box set of the first three movies in the early 2000s. However, just a few years ago, some independent company took that third minutes, spliced some footage detailing the themes of the first three movies, threw a narration on top, and called it Sleepaway Camp 4....

This was obviously a direct-to-dvd release. It was around 1hr 10 mins long, but there's really not much to it. The opening crawl states that some woman went to a psych ward or something, her therapist tried to help her, but she couldn't remember many details about the brutal murders that happened in the first three movies. The therapist suggests she goes back to the campgrounds to see if that'll trigger her memories. The naration is her talking about the events. That's pretty much it. It's implied that the woman is actually Angela, but oh well.

More on this movie:

The most infamous of all the unmade Sleepaway Camp sequels is without question The Survivor, which was to be the fourth installment in the series. Centering on a survivor of the original Sleepaway Camp named Allison Kramer, The Survivor entered production in October of 1992 and a full 30-minutes of the film was shot, before the production company went bankrupt. That spelled the end of the entire production, and it wasn't until 10 years later that the footage was released to the public.

2002 saw the release of Anchor Bay's Sleepaway Camp Survival Kit DVD box set, which included a special fourth disc, containing the rough footage that was shot for The Survivor. In 2012, that footage was cleaned up and flashbacks from the previous films were added to it, along with newly recorded narration and visual effects. The idea was to essentially paint a picture of what the fourth installment was going to be like, and the pseudo-Sleepaway Camp 4: The Survivor was independently released on DVD, currently available through Amazon's burn-on-demand program.

Return To Sleepaway Camp

Another production hell story! This movie was completed in the early 2000s, but wasn't released until 2008, because the director wasn't happy about the special effects.

Anyway, we return to the first camp, again under a different name for obvious reasons. The kicker? This ignores Sleepaway Camp 2,3, and 4, taking place a few years after the events of the original. The buff guy, Angela, and Ricky all reprise their roles for this awful, awful film.

Return forgets everything that made the other movies great (or passable in the case of Sleepaway Camp 2) and goes for this really weird comedy angle. The whole movie revolves around a group of campers making fun of this fat kid (who's a jerk, but they certainly don't help). This is meant to trick the viewer into thinking he's the one doing all the killing, but of course its not. They even got Ricky to say Angela's in a psych ward and he visits her.

Well, as the movie starts to end, Ricky finally comes back to camp to prove that it's not Angela doing the killing. Surprise, it is. She reveals herself as this police officer who had been speaking through one of those throat voice box things throughout the entire movie. The reveal here wasn't bad, but I didn't really feel much about it. They pretty much wasted Felissa Rose by giving her those short few minutes of screentime. The only likable people were the returning cast members. Otherwise, everyone in this movie just sucked.

Anyway, here are my rankings from best to worst.

Sleepaway Camp
Sleepaway Camp 3
Sleepaway Camp 2
Return To Sleepaway Camp



Sleepaway Camp 4? This is barely a movie so idk.

There were some pitches for a true Sleepaway Camp 4, with the best (imo) being one that brought Pamela Springsteen and Felissa Rose together for a final showdown, Pamela as Angela and Felissa Rose as a person who's playing Angela in some cult play. It sounded amazing. More on that:

SLEEPAWAY CAMP: SUMMER STALK

In 1989, even before The Survivor entered production, Double Helix Films planned a fourth installment in the series in the form of Summer Stalk, a play on words in reference to the fact that the film was to take place at a summer stock theater, built on the site of the demolished Camp Arawak. In an interesting twist, the theater plans a musical production of Angela's life, with Angela herself (played by Felissa Rose) auditioning for the role of Angela – only, we don't at first know that Angela is really Angela, since she's believed to be dead.

”One of the fun parts to the story was that a religious cult had grown up around the legend of Angela and they were trying to halt the production of the play which they felt was sacrilegious to her memory," Sleepaway Camp 2 & 3 director Michael A. Simpson told SleepawayCampFilms.com, about the project. ”These nut jobs were among those who believed Angela was dead so when the killings start we aren't sure who is doing the murders. Is it these religious kooks or Angela being her bad little transsexual psychopathic self again?"

Simpson continued: ”I wanted to show this story mainly through the eyes of the woman who thinks she is Angela. She's been in and out of mental hospitals and has lost touch with reality. She really thinks she is Angela but is she? I felt a great way to twist this Angela character into someone sympathetic was to have her haunted by her apparent victims. You could have these zombie-like dead characters from the first three movies popping up at the most importune moments, singing and dancing. I thought the musical numbers should be surreal, like a demented version of Rocky Horror."

The plan was for the film to end with a battle between Felissa Rose's Angela and Pamela Springsteen's, the two Angelas engaging in a fight to the death. ”It would make the ultimate Sleepaway Camp film," Simpson said. ”It would be talked about for decades."

via: Halloween Love

 

[Violence Jack]

I for one was really surprised by how much I liked Return to Sleepaway Camp, even though the surprise at the end was horribly done. They could've done a better job with the sheriff disguise for Angela, even on a low budget. But I enjoyed how nasty and mean it was, just like the first film, and the kills were pretty good.

I couldn't enjoy SC 2 or 3 at all.

 

[Pilgrimzero]

Seen them all and yeah the first is really the only one worth watching.

As much as Hollywood loves remakes you'd think they would give this a shot.

 

[norm9]

Only watched the first. Your OP got me interested in the sequels now.

 

[Robdraggoo]

Brad Jones (the cinema snob) has reviwed all these and it is among his best work.

 

[cbrun44]

The 1st is a legit slasher classic. That ending gives me chills just thinking about it. That imagery ... completely flips the relatively light hearted tame tone of the film to something terrifying. So good.

The sequels... at least 2 and 3 which I've seen are just bad.

 

[BattleMonkey]

Never thought any of them were really any good. The first simply only got any fame due to it's shock ending, but without that ending, it's a pretty mediocre slasher