“I’ve never chopped wood before. But I’ve chopped other things.”

Justin’s rating: But “Angela” backward is… “Alegna!” Which means nothing, I guess.

Justin’s review: The very late ’80s rarely had genuinely scary movies so much as bad guys trying to be noticed for their quips, creative kills, and looks. Maybe they were making a dating video and trying to impress potential love interests.

The second and third Sleepaway Camp flicks very much want Angela (Pamela Springsteen) to be a rare female Freddy Krueger-type, although all she’s got on her side is the hidden strength of a man, a very obvious wig, and an unrelenting vendetta against naughty campers. Shot back-to-back with Sleepaway Camp II, the third installment tries so SO hard to make this character edgy and cool, as if the world was clamoring for even more Angela as a horror icon.

After running down a girl with the biggest Mack truck you’ve ever seen, Angela takes her place as one of the campers for Camp New Horizons. This is, we’re told, an experimental camp that mixes teens from wealthy and poor neighborhoods across the entire country for… reasons. Reasons to get racist, it turns out.

Camp New Horizons turns out to be a rebranded Camp Rolling Hills, where Angela killed 19 people (!) the year before and was never caught. And oh hey, there she is right on live TV next to all the other campers and nobody seems to recognize her, including the interviewer. You think her face would be all over the news, but nope.

Angela’s whole purpose of being there is, as far as I can tell, to judge everyone for even the slightest perceived infraction and then end them in ways that the filmmakers hope you’ll tell your school friends about on Monday. Everyone else’s purpose of being there is to bore us by being one-dimensional stereotypes.

It’s incredibly weird that this entire camp is made of three counselors and 15 “teens.” That’s it. I counted. Nobody seems like they want to be there whatsoever, including the camp leads who act like boorish buffoons.

Anyway, everyone goes off into the woods to camp, Angela racks up 16 kills over 80 minutes, and so many casual slurs are bandied about that you might as well assume a wince position before starting. There’s even a girl named “Arab” who’s not one, and I have no idea what the deal is here. While the kills look completely fakey, the racism feels real in an off-the-cuff manner.

The one thought I keep coming to with the second and third flick is that Angela actually is quite likable when she’s not trying to be a quippy serial killer. Springsteen demonstrates a modicum of charisma doing normal stuff, but she sounds so artificial and lame when she’s trying to put on this killer persona. I would actually like to see her in a non-murdery camp film.

Everyone in this too-small setting splits up for outdoor sleeping so that Angela can kill all of them off, one by one, with nobody noticing. Some of the more interesting characters are, sadly, knocked off first, and the only tension that’s present is that one of the counselors was the dad of someone Angela killed in the last massacre.

Eventually all of this culminates in a game where Angela challenges the survivors to a lethal scavenger hunt, but it’s too late in the film and too skimpy to save this effort.

Sleepaway Camp III wants to cultivate this edgy, witty vibe but can’t be taken seriously on any level. If a horror movie ever felt like it was being condescending, this is it. It’s lazy and rude, and trust me — nobody was really begging for more Angela after this.

Intermission!

• There’s a shorter version where most of the kills are truncated and the longer, original DVD version
• Who takes off their shirt by pulling it down the neckhole?
• That truck kill is brutal… and inefficient… and in broad daylight
• “Angela is back!” graffiti
• This is not so much a news interview as a stereotype introduction scene
• TV reporters like to ask campers for cocaine sometimes
• “It’ll really clean your pipes.”
• Washing in the lake and eating the fish that you catch from the lake… yum
• Angela wears the biggest bra ever
• “We’re here!” they say at a random spot in the woods.
• Fishing up the Jason mask: “It’s Saturday… the 14th”
• Firecracker fish
• You can be killed by someone lightly thwapping you with a not-that-thick stick
• Girl needs to go to the bathroom in the woods? Send a guy with her and then walk a long way away. Are you guys looking for the perfect pee tree?
• The ol’ firecracker-in-the-mouth trick
• I get a bit of a kick seeing Angela having to drag around the corpses and cover her tracks. That’s hard work right there.
• Cooking marshmallows over the tent where you burned some dude alive
• Her head turned into paper mache
• Who likes “stupid rap tapes” any more?
• “Strike three.”
• They caught an awful lot of fish
• It does seem like it should be a lot harder to bury someone alive when they’re awake and have all their limbs free
• Angela’s rap is not going to climb the Billboard Top 40
• Maybe stop running on the road if someone’s chasing you in a Jeep?
• It took me WAY too long to realize that most of the characters are named after Brady Bunch characters
• Double axe kill seems very lucky
• “I kind of already have a boyfriend.” OUCH
• EMTs don’t mind some casual murder from time to time