Summer of Slash: Sleepaway Camp (AKA Nightmare Vacation)
One gap in my knowledge of the American slasher film has always been the 1983 entry Sleepaway Camp. I don't know why I always skipped watching this when the opportunity came up (I vividly remember the cover box from days as a youngster perusing the horror aisles at the local video store, and wanting to watch it), maybe it was because it's reputation solely rested on one element and one element only: its shock ending. I didn't really feel like slogging through a below mediocre slasher just to get to one scene, but hey, I did a few years ago with The Burning (whose gore effects were more than worth wadding through the mediocrity of that film) and this year with The Prowler (ditto), so I figured what the hell…I'd finally give Sleepaway Camp a shot for my horror project this summer. What I found was a film that was exactly the opposite of the aforementioned gore-effect classics: here's a film that is far more cerebral, a film that for 1 hour and 18 minutes seems like a nice little entry into the slasher subgenre with its unwillingness to rely on stupid teenagers running into the woods to get slaughtered and other tired genre tropes; however, all of those "nice" qualities are heightened by the film's final two minutes that more than lives up to its reputation. Usually twist endings don't do anything for me, but every once in awhile a twist ending gives new context to a film, it lingers in your mind for days and makes it nearly impossible to forget not just the image, but the film as a whole. Sleepaway Camp has this type of ending.
