Sleepaway Camp

Oh the early 80’s, what a glorious time for horror you were..and a bad time to go to camp apparently. Released during the slasher film boom that seemed to follow John Carpenter’s almighty Halloween, Sleepaway Camp is a cute little story about a girl named Angela *whose father and brother tragically die in a boating accident at the start of the film) and her cousin who are going off to Camp Arawak (not to be confused with the equally sinister Camp Crystal Lake) for the summer.  Of course some murderous shit starts going on, and as more and more campers and counselers die, everyone wants to know whoooo is doing the killin’. Sure, we all have our suspicions as to who, what, why, and how and we’re more or less right, as they don’t really make a huge effort to throw the viewer off the trail of what’s up. What they dooo do, haha i said dodo, is give you a big disturbing twist of an ending that you may or may not see coming depending on how close you’ve been paying attention or how horror-saavy you are. Granted, in today’s era of sensationalism and desensitization, the ending seems rather tame, but I’d imagine that back in 1983 it threw folks for a loop.
Since that time, SC has become a cult classic, spawning 2 good-not-great original sequels, the new one coming out next week that i mentioned a few weeks ago, and apparently a couple more after that according to the all-knowing wikipedia. I’m sure all the new ones will be terrible, but hey, ya never know.