Night 2 of 31 Nights of Horror

Messy. While watching this movie, my first reaction was ‘disappointing’, but after thinking on it for some time, I think messy is a better description.

This article was difficult to start, my thoughts are kind of all over the place, but so is this movie. I think it lacked focus, it COULD have gone in a bunch of different directions, but didn’t. As a horror movie, it wasn’t very scary, there was no suspense, no shock, as a slasher movie, there was very little blood or gore and the kills were mostly unimaginative. There were times when I thought it was going to be a parody of ’80s horror movies, but it never quite seemed to lean fully in that direction either, and it wasn’t funny. I would have said it felt rushed or underfunded, if there hadn’t been a 5 year gap between the original film and this one and the budget weren’t almost double.

The absolute biggest problem, in my opinion, is on the audio side. I forget if it was in an interview, an article or director’s commentary, but I remember learning that the original Halloween movie by John Carpenter tested very poorly with audiences until he went back and added that now iconic musical score. Sleepaway Camp II proves just how important the soundscape is to the feel of a movie, because it doesn’t have one. There are a few rock songs peppered around the place, but the majority of the 80 minute runtime is devoid of atmosphere, except for one solitary chase scene towards the end that has a low key, almost too quiet background track that doesn’t add much to the suspense. Remember how I liked the first movie because it felt like a real living camp? That’s gone. This one has a good number of extras and background people (though not as many as the first) but you don’t hear them. In crowd scenes, you don’t have that hum of human activity that would naturally be present. You hear bugs though. All of the forest and nighttime scenes had normal, natural environmental noise, but anything with people didn’t.

Fixing all that would have helped with the feel of the movie, but that probably would have only elevated it to mediocre. To be at least a more memorable experience, all they needed to do was pick a lane and stick to it. Since they weren’t going for mystery (they show who the killer is within the first five minutes) they could have focused on Angela’s backstory, shown her experiences after the first film, why she was obsessed enough with camp to murder anyone she thought didn’t belong. They could have made one of the campers or other counsellors the lead and done a Columbo style story where the audiences know who the perp is, but the protagonist slowly pieces the clues together, or they could have really set themselves apart from the other movies of the time by doing a full send-up of the kings of this genre. When Angela is walking around the cabin trying to figure out the best thing to murder Demi with, I thought that’s where they were going, but as a comedy, the jokes just didn’t land.

I paid attention to the credits. There was a stunt coordinator, but no stunt performers. They took mostly inexperienced actors and had them do their own stunts and it shows. The action is boring, the single chase scene of the film is at low speed and you even have a fall that literally just cuts from the actress stepping off a rock to her lying on the ground.

This part may just be me nitpicking, but the ages of the “campers” skewed way too high. In the first movie a lot of the cast were believable as teen summer camp attendees. If you need adult actors because you’ve decided to crank the nudity dial up to eleven, then at least make them counsellors. Sorry, I’m not buying these 18-20 somethings as kids spending their holidays there because their parents made them.

Do I need to talk about the ending? There wasn’t one, the movie just… ends. Was that a cliffhanger? Are they forcing me to watch the third movie? No, I’m not going to and they can’t make me. If you want to, then be my guest, this movie, the first and the third are all available to stream for free with ads on Tubi, or without if you have an Amazon Prime sub.