Shot almost immediately after Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers, Michael A. Simpson’s Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland is the type of cheap quickie sequel that eventually ruined the slasher film genre. Angela (Pamela Springsteen) murders a poor girl with “Milk” and “Shake” tattooed on her chest, assumes her identity, and takes her place at Camp New Horizons, a summer getaway on the site of previous killing ground Camp Rolling Hills that, under new stewardship, now seeks to bring together kids from wealthy and destitute backgrounds. Socio-economic status, however, means little to Angela, who finds something deviant, or just plain annoying, about all of her stereotypical fellow campers (including the black guy who loves rap, the Hispanic guy from East L.A., and the rich, racist snob), and thus sets about dispatching all of them in a 24-hour span. Seemingly filmed without a script or a budget, the movie is both aimless (Angela slays anyone who rubs her the wrong way) and, more problematically, humorless. Springsteen is still game as the cheeky serial killer, but after this dreadful third go-round, the series – about to be revived by original creator Robert Hiltzik with 2005’s Return to Sleepaway Camp – should have been permanently closed for business.
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