“Let this be a lesson to you. Say no to drugs.”

Justin’s rating: Announcements announcements announcements, a terrible way to die!

Justin’s review: Usually, the first sequel of a franchise ends up being the trendsetter for the movies to follow, and so the filmmakers have to decide how much they want to break from the original film and what they want to take from it going forward. Maybe the series will soften up, so the sequel ends up downgrading from, say, an R to a PG. Perhaps it’ll reduce a complex focus to a rather simple one or even swap genres altogether. More often than not, it starts to get awful, fast. But in any case, once you get to the second movie of a series, you can usually predict what everything after will be like.

So what are we to make of Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers? While the first movie was a rather crafty tale of murder and mystery at a summer camp — with a gut-punch of an ending — the sequel elected to jettison any subtlety in favor of being a somewhat comedic slasher in the vein of the later Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street flicks. This was 1988, after all, and everyone in the horror industry was skewing this way. Slashers weren’t meant to be scary or tense any more; they were jokey, referred to the competition, and tried to one-up each other with ridiculously over-the-top kills.

I think you can infer a lot about the direction here from the poster art:

Five years after the first movie, messed-in-the-head Angela is back at camp — but as a counselor under a pseudonym. She’s also played by Bruce Springsteen’s sister (seriously!) Pamela and is best friends with Molly, who’s played by Charlie and Emilio’s younger sister Renée Estevez.

Even after (implied) forced gender-conversion surgery and plenty of therapy, Angela isn’t quite reformed from her homicidal ways. Now stationed at Camp Rolling Hills, it doesn’t take too long before she starts to go after the misbehaving staff and teens while trying to snark it up like Freddy or Chucky. She’s a bit of a stickler for rules and modest behavior, and the second that someone steps out of line… BAM. Semi-ironic death scene. And there’s a whole lot of misbehaving, because apparently someone sprayed this camp with pheromones and sent the entire population into a mating frenzy.

Sleepaway Camp II struggles to find its balance between horror, comedy, and camp shenanigans — and never comes close to being good at any of it. It’s forever reducing its characters to one-note stereotypes that overact at every possible opportunity. Almost all of the older “teen” counselors clearly graduated high school a decade before and are a decade out from having a midlife crisis. So perhaps that makes it not feel as shocking when Angela flips out and starts whittling them down one at a time?

Other than occasionally getting slices of camp life right — like the dumb songs, the crafts, the blindfolded tour through a touchy-feely horror show — there isn’t much to recommend with this one. Once in a while, far too infrequently for my liking, there’s some good snark and a glimpse of the kind of darkly funny film it could’ve been if it wasn’t constantly going for the lowest common denominator. (Admittedly, I did like the two characters dressing up as Freddy and Jason in some pretty lame cosplay.)

I never smiled or chuckled even when the movie clearly hoped I would. Although it is increasingly silly how people keep vanishing without anyone in this camp growing concerned until there’s like two people left. This is like a pantomime of a slasher, going through the paces without doing anything well — even lampooning its own nature.

Its biggest misfire is Angela, who acts like the world’s biggest stick-in-the-mud buzzkill even when she isn’t killing people (making that actress try to say the word “fornicating” in a menacing tone, over and over, was quite the choice). You will never, for a second, believe that she can actually kill people because all of these murders are done so half-heartedly you can see the actors doing most of the work to play dead.

One of the worst offenders was when Angela sort-of stabs a girl in the back — twice — which the victim finds mildly annoying, and then somehow strongarms this girl into flopping into an outhouse. Then Angela kind of prods her with a stick until she presumably drowns. At no point can you squint and believe that a life-or-death struggle is happening.

I mean, maybe a better interpretation for this movie is that it’s all a lame skit that the counselors are performing for a talent show? I could kind of see that.

Anyway, Sleepaway Camp II is a hard watch without much to recommend. The killer is grating, the kills are pathetic, the frequent nudity unnecessary, and the cringe factor high with all sorts of slurs being cast about left and right. If this is an indication of where the series is heading from here (and there are three more movies!), I’m jumping out of the car and hitching a ride to a better franchise.

Intermission!

• So many ’80s male mullets and female super-hair
• “WASTED!”
• “Nice girls don’t have to show it off.”
• Counselor of the week is a thing and it’ll earn you a giant blue ribbon
• Dumb camp songs at meals is a relatable tradition
• Laying on wet towels doesn’t seem like a genius idea
• The fakeout of the “blood” under the table turning out to be red paint, and then the red “blood” being syrup
• “Who’s out there?” “JUST US MONSTERS!”
• How many jockstraps does one camp have?
• “What’s really in there?” “Dead teenagers’ brains.”
• Hey, it’s Freddy and Jason… lookalikes! And death by Freddy’s claw and Leatherface’s chainsaw.
• After you’re had unprotected sex with someone, best to ask them if they have AIDS.
• Welcome to the Cabin of Death. Probably stinks in here.
• Sean’s head in the TV. I guess that’s something?
• You can boil battery acid in a mug without any splash-over
• “If it’s any consolation, you almost made it to the end.”
• The characters are named after members of the ’80s Brat Pack: Molly (Molly Ringwald), Sean (Sean Penn), Ally (Ally Sheedy), TC (Tom Cruise), Uncle John (John Hughes), Mare (Mare Winningham), Rob (Rob Lowe), Demi (Demi Moore), Lea (Lea Thompson), Brooke (Brooke Shields), Jodi (Jodie Foster), Anthony (Anthony Michael Hall), Judd (Judd Nelson), Charlie (Charlie Sheen), Phoebe (Phoebe Cates), Emilio (Emilio Estevez), Diane (Diane Lane).

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