Slashed

Something I did - on the same night that I watched "Zapped" - was to finally watch the second and third entries in the "Sleepaway Camp" series of slasher films. I had really enjoyed the original, which was rather different from the typical sort of fare that I have seen so much of. It lacked certain inhibitors that movies like Friday the 13th had. Those Jason movies, and others like them, are really incredibly conservative and staid when you compare them.

Sleepaway Camp was something else. They made it the year I was born, and it feels like it. The sequels were made when I was about kindergarten aged, and they're a little less dated, but not by much. Something that's novel is that whereas the original featured an unseen killer (as is often the case), the sequels have the killer be very much out in the open. They don't even do the thing where we know who the killer is and the rest of the characters only see them when they are getting killed. It's just a bunch of people, and one of them keeps killing people.

The killer chooses rather curious ways of killing people and keeping it secret. In the second one, campers are killed and their absence is explained by saying that they were sent home. This works a lot longer than you would think. In the third film, the campers are divided into three groups as they "rough it" for a few days before returning to their cabins. The killer takes advantages of this and also makes a series of other flimsy excuses to conceal the killings, and this also works a very long time.

I worried in both films that the movie would run out of gas - that by killing people at a brisk pace almost from the beginning, that the killer would have to be through or else caught within half an hour. That fear was unfounded though, and the movies carried on to a bare minimum running time of around 80 minutes apiece of killings and gratuitous nudity that puts the better known slasher films to shame. They really aren't too bad. I don't imagine I'll go for the sequels that were made very recently, but these two weren't bad.