Sleepaway Camp II : Unhappy Campers

The killing in Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers is quite inventive, which earns the film some positive points, but on the other hand, there's basically nothing to see here; you have to imagine most of it yourself. Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers simply plays on the fact that the killer in a slasher film can be an innocent girl. The continuity with previous events is not addressed, and the viewer is supposed to just enjoy the horror entertainment. Which does come. (31/12/2016)

Instead of straightforward attractions, the first instalment of the Sleepaway Camp series was built on the environment of summer camps as the eternal hell of adolescence saturated with bullying and socialisation processes that crush individuality. In the second part of the series, the new creators (because, like Halloween and Friday the 13th, this originally indie genre franchise quickly fell into the clutches of a major studio) turned the whole concept on its head, conversely serving up a slick series of camp-themed murders, deliberately but unfortunately non-conceptually straddling the boundary between full-on slasher flick and parody. This time, the novelty in the context of the genre is not only the fact that it is clear from the beginning who the killer is, but also that it is actually the main character. The trend of elevating monsters to starring roles was introduced by the most popular franchises, especially A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and Halloween. However, the narratives of those films still mostly had a standard structure, where new groups of teenagers always developed into the central characters or the final girl from the preceding instalments continues in the hunt for the monster. Conversely, the second Sleepaway Camp shows, from the very beginning, the camp and its occupants through the eyes of the murderer, through whom they relate more to her reserved effort to both display and enforce exemplary behaviour from murder to murder. In the end, the film paradoxically again continues in the principle of the first part, in that it provides greater amusement through its overarching work with genre formulas than through its primary attractions. The slaughter of teenagers this time has noticeably more verve and explicitness, but by completely eliminating suspense from the film, these aspects became only mechanically arranged scenes without gradation or any deeper effect, as well as without sufficiently utilised exaggeration. (21/01/2021)