Halloween Horrors are here again, with Varied Celluloid covering the latest in Horror cinema and the greatest of old. This month is a tribute to all things of the macabre, with this front page being taken up by horror reviews and thoughts. Check back daily for new reviews, as the rest of this month will be littered with sessions dealing with the obscure and the grotesque! And today we have the continuation of everyone’s favorite tranny teenage killer movie! It has been quite a while since Angela was last slaying teenagers, but who could be the killer now? Watch the movie and find out!
The Review: The Sleepaway Camp series as a whole is generally listed amongst most horror fans as guilty pleasures. The first movie is most certainly the best remembered, namely due to a brilliant twist performed in the third act – but after revisiting the film a while back I discovered it wasn’t as poorly put together as I had thought during my first viewing of it so long ago. I suppose I wasn’t as used to poor acting back in those days as I have grown to become now. That first film had some pretty atrocious performances to be sure. Robert Hiltzik is the man responsible for the series and the creator of the first film. After that it was all but taken out of his hands and two sequels were produced, directed by Michael Simpson and starring Pamela Springsteen (Bruce Springsteen’s sister) as an older Angela who has come back to the camp as a counselor looking to punish all the bad children. The series quickly moved from the more serious tone of the first film into outright horror comedy as Angela looked to one-up both Freddy and Jason in body count and in puns. These sequels, although not truthful to Hiltzik’s vision, were certainly a ton of fun for most of us horror fans. However, after that train slowed to a crawl one last sequel had began in the Sleepaway Camp series. Unfortunately Sleepaway Camp 4: The Survivor only made it part of the way through production before falling apart and now only about thirty five minutes or so of footage exist of this mini-feature. After that, everyone all but assumed the series was doomed to remain an artifact of the past. However, thanks to the guys over at SleepawayCampFilms.com (official site for sequels 2, 3 and 4) and SleepawayCampMovies.com (official site for 1 and Return) interest for the series was found to be as high as ever and director Hiltzik was actually brought back to the series due to the demand of fans and the persistence of those webmasters. Now, here we are with Sleepaway Camp 5: Return to Sleepaway Camp due to be released shortly, there has been a lot of talk about the film and a lot of folks curious about whether or not the film could possibly live up to all the promise of the predecessors. Well, it all depends on what you might expect. It’s unfortunate that after so many years that the problems that plagued the original film could still remain a problem to this day – but in much the same way the things that were fun and intriguing about that first film are still as fresh and innovative here.