Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp unimaginatively mimics Friday the 13th’s summer camp setting for its string of mysterious slayings, but the film’s infatuation with gender confusion is its own dubious legacy to the 1980s slasher flick genre. Years after a boating accident claimed her father and younger brother, silent, wide-eyed Angela (Felissa Rose) is sent to camp with her potty-mouthed cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) by Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould), a long-fingered freakshow whose pasty clown make-up and wacko theatrical affectations mark her as the most unreliable maternal substitute ever forced upon an orphaned child. At camp, those who pick on passive Angela – and thus infuriate protective Ricky – wind up dead. Yet the film is less entertaining as a guessing game about the killer’s identity than as an artifact of a now-antiquated early-‘80s pop culture in which young kids (played by teenagers and 20-somethings) swore like sailors, men wore package-hugging shorts, and anyone with questions about his or her sexual identity was, at heart, an unhinged psycho with a prudish interest in killing promiscuous cretins. Though it has significantly less gore and nudity than its campier, self-referential sequels, Hiltzik’s original is still the finest Sleepaway Camp, if only because of its memorable final shot, a hilarious, repulsive – and, for those with same-sex inclinations, potentially offensive – image of androgynous turmoil that remains burned in one’s mind long after the derivative plot has faded from memory.
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