Kizlar kampi (1987)

... aka: Girl's Camp
... aka: Kızlar Kampı

Directed by:
Kadir Akgün

Eight excessively happy young ladies, led by the pretty hot Fulya (Fulya Kumcu), decide to leave Istanbul and go on a little camping trip out in the sticks. When they stop for something to eat, Fulya notices some older, sleazy-looking guy (sporting sunglasses, a popped collar, a shirt unbuttoned to the waist and white short shorts!) lurking around. It's the same guy Fulya previously saw outside her apartment before they left and the same guy who cut them off when they were driving. Now he's there peeping on them again. Cause for alarm? Not if you're these chicks. They hop in their van, start laughing, singing and dancing, and occasionally look right at the camera with a sheepish grin. The guy (Nuri Alço) hops right back in his BMW and continues trailing them to the beach, where he spies on them while they're swimming and finds out where they'll be camping for the night... which also happens to be on a small plot of land covered with jagged rocks! When two girls go off into the brush and catch the perv trying to watch them pee, they chase him off. But do they pack up their tents and head elsewhere? Seeing how seven of the eight will find themselves dead soon enough, do we even need to ask?

Having now stripped down to a speedo, the stalker (who turns out to be Fulya'a ex) keeps watching as they play volleyball, grill, sunbathe and talk to a goofy dwarf hunter (Orhan Başaran) who wanders by. Later that night when the girls are doing a dance around a bonfire (!) to a song called "Fire and Ice," one of the girls wanders off into the brush and gets dragged off. No one even notices she's missing until the next morning, which prompts a search of the area that lasts ten minutes and consists of the girls walking around in the woods calling out the missing girl's name at least 100 times. The one chubby girl of the group ends up finding her bloodied corpse on the beach and then gets chased down and strangled / drowned by the killer. After finding both bodies, the others attempt to leave but their van has been tampered with.

 

In spite of what's been going on, these bimbos continue to wander off alone. When her friends go for a walk, one stays behind to be strangled. Then a girl walks off into the woods by herself and gets stabbed through the chest. When her body is found by the hunter, the girls simply dig a grave, put their dead friend in it, throw dirt on her and make a tombstone! Each death is followed by a group whining / crying session. The remaining four girls pack a bag, take directions from the hunter and decide to hike out of there to safety, which leads to more whining about how tired they are. In fact, most of the last 40 minutes consists of the girls walking up and down hills moaning, gasping and whining. Every once in awhile one will get picked off. One of the two lead males - the stalker and the hunter - tries to implicate the other in the killings with a series of false flashbacks.

This incredibly dumb and cheap (shot with a camcorder) Turkish slasher has plenty of laughs scattered throughout but gets bogged down by long stretches where nothing much happens, which barely robs it of its true SBIG glory. While there's no nudity, the primary focus seems to be on showing girls running around all over the place in skimpy bikinis, which they wear nearly the entire movie. Some of the camerawork is hilariously exploitative, too, especially a moment when the camera pans up and down a girl's body and then focuses on her crotch (!) while she's being strangled to death. They also left in a clearly visible shots of the cameraman's shadow and the flood lights they used for the night scenes.

Also worth noting are the bizarre wardrobe changes, with the girls modeling different suits from one scene to the next and characters showing up in new outfits even when they have no real way of getting them. But this does at least have a bad 80s movie dream aesthetic with all the big hair, giant hoop earrings, high waisted mom jeans, neon green shirts reading "America" and "Crazy Girl," excessive bangles, over the shoulder sweaters and the like. Seeing how Turkey had a thriving VHS market during the 80s and 90s, I'm surprised there wasn't more homegrown direct-to-video horror product than there was back then.

I could find no poster or VHS box for this title so I'm not sure exactly where / when / if it was even officially released. It certainly never saw the light of day outside of Turkey. The director also made BRUTAL STORM (1985), an unsanctioned remake of the Spanish film It Happened at Nightmare Inn, Şeytan Kızlar / "Devil Girls" (1987), Anahtar / "Key" (1988), Lanetli Kadınlar / "Cursed Women" (aka Bloody Mansion of Death).

★1/2