Sleepaway Camp (1983)

It's bad.

It's so fucking bad.

Today on Movie Russian Roulette, I swear eternal vengeance on my cousin Dominic for recommending this movie, Sleepaway Camp, to me.

Overview: This movie opens with a guy with a very hairy chest out on a boat with his kids: a young boy and a young girl. After a very awkwardly shot boat tip, some jackass who's letting his girlfriend distract him runs over the young family in the water, because of course he does.

The movie then performs the thing that lit up beautiful warning flags everywhere: after an opening scene with characters we're barely introduced to and care nothing for suffering horrible fates, the movie gives us the old "EIGHT YEARS LATER" title card. Nothing quite like a sudden time skip. And then, we get to see this face:

This movie is full of great faces.

This bizarre lovechild of a magical homosexual coupling of Michael Jackson and Willie Wonka makes "wacky" asides to the audience and is almost as creepy as both her daddies combined. I mean, this woman reveals she's a doctor by mentioning that she gave her own children physicals just before she sends them off to camp for the summer.

I should spend some time on our main characters, Ricky and Angela, because they form the core of this movie. Ricky is the quintessential, Call of Duty playing 11-year-old badass transported back in time to the eighties: he curses out people constantly, is too cool for your shit, and knows all about the sex which he is so good at.

Angela, meanwhile, is a creepy, wide-eyed mute chick and Ricky's (sister? cousin? I may or may have not have drank heavily to get through this turkey). That's her entire personality for 99.9% of the movie. Although after an entire half-hour of movie, we learn in a throwaway line that Angela is the sole survivor of the boat crash we saw at the start of the movie. Seriously. The movie takes that long to give its opening scene a point. That's the caliber of movie I'm dealing with here.

The two get sent off to camp filled with sunny days, delightful peers, and a pedophile of a head chef. Quote follows:

"Ain't no such thing as too young. You're just too old!"

He, of course, almost immediately attempts to rape Angela, who is saved by Our Lord and Noob Tubing Savior, Ricky. The pedo chef is almost immediately burned to a crisp by having boiling water poured on him for two seconds.

Wrong pedophile chef.

A series of murders follow, along with a bunch of creepy prepubescent sexuality. This movie lingers way too much on the romantic complications of a bunch of (allegedly) young boys and girls. (At least it's better than anime insisting the 10-year-old looking chick is totally like, actually 800 years old because she's an alien or something, bro, so go mack on dat.) This is helped or either made around 900 times worse by the campers apparently either being 12 or 23 years old. There is no middle ground; the campers in this movie are either little kids or college students.

Throughout all this murder, the camp of course stays open, because of course it does. After all, without the camp, where else would the underage kissin' cousins couple get busy?

Drink to forget the pain of being on a government watchlist, friends.

Notable moments/elements: The head of the camp is 60 years old, and he's only there to, as Dominic puts it, "smoke cigars, get drunk, and bang coeds." He also beats Ricky aka xHEDSHOTSU02x half to death, in the most glorious film depiction of child abuse this world has ever seen. Early in the movie, he establishes his level of "zero shits given" by just standing by and watching as 15 kids pummel each other right in front of him.

Also, this face:

Told you this movie had great faces.

I've been talking a lot about our time-traveling, spawncamping hero, but let me show you his badassness in a quote:

Ricky aka Internet Tough Guy: "This guy blows dead dogs. Drive it in there."

Camper Who is Supposed to be 13 but Looks Like He Pays Child Support: "Eat shit and die, Ricky!"

Ricky aka COME AT ME, BRO: "Eat shit and live!"

One of the murder victims also gets "locked" in a bathroom stall as wasps eat his face, ignoring that he could totally crawl underneath the door and escape.

And of top of all this, the "reason" that the killer is doing all this is a twist so limp and ineffectual that in my personal headcanon of the world, M. Night wrote this script. I won't spoil it (because it's hilarious), but it comes out of nowhere and thinks it's being clever, when really it fails almost as hard as The Room. Seriously, even The Hooded Claw had a more realistic motivation than this murderer.

My thoughts: This is, without question, the worst movie I've watched here on the blog. Although its runtime is just under an hour and a half, it feels more like three hours. The acting is wooden, the characters are forgettable (except for the mother), and the movie feels like it has no point. This movie was difficult to get through even with my faithful companion Mr. Daniels. Yet, I would recommend this movie more than any other featured on the blog to date. This movie becomes so bad, so offensive, so inexplicable, that it becomes like an old video game looping around to a Minus World ala Mario and becomes amazing. This is such a perfect storm of bad that it's great. 

Dominic, you magnificent bastard, I toast you this day, because I will forever cherish this movie.

This movie is one of the worst things I've ever seen, and I recommend that anyone with a pulse watch it. Bring plenty of alcohol; you'll need it.

I give this movie a Nic Cage Deals With a Problematic Employee out of five. Until next time, my friends; I have learned that these people made a sequel, after all...