Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989)

... aka: Nightmare Vacation III
... aka: Sleepaway Camp 3

Directed by:
Michael A. Simpson

Let's first state the obvious: Part III is a silly, corny, juvenile and incredibly dumb comic slasher sequel, so if you're looking to be scared, look elsewhere. That said, if you've got a hankering for cheap gore, terrible one-liners and bare breasts, you should have no problem laughing along with this hokey hunk of late 80s junk. Say what you want about it, but it is entertaining. Shot back-to-back with Part II somewhere in the boonies of Georgia by the same director and crew, the delightful Pamela Springsteen returns as chirpy moralistic psycho Angela Baker. In the charming opening sequence, she runs over a frizzy-haired tramp (Kashina Kessler) with "Milk Shake" tattooed on her chest, then crushes the body in a garbage truck, steals the girl's id card, assumes her identity ("Maria Nicastro") and then uses it to go back to - Where else? - camp. The victim was one of a half dozen disadvantaged teenagers selected to go Camp New Horizons, where counselors Herman (Michael J. Pollard) and Lily (Sandra Dorsey) Miranda are conducting an "experiment in sharing" by mixing poor inner city teens with rich kids. Well actually, they're only really interested in the money but that is neither here nor there...

Angela is introduced to her fellow campers and soon realizes that nearly every one of them is obnoxious, perverted, a druggie, a "fornicator" or just incredibly annoying. She then decides to do society a favor by slaughtering them. Among the fodder are Cindy Hammersmith (Kim Wall), a perky cheerleader who's also a racist snob, rap-music-loving gang-banger Riff (Daryl Wilcher), who comes packing heat, Asian bitch Arab (Jill Terashita), who makes fun of Angela's industrial strength bra, brain-damaged spray-paint-obsessed punk Snowboy (Kyle Holman) and wanna-be politician and closet bondage enthusiast Bobby Stark (Haynes Brooke; who is best known these days as the guy in the sunshine suit from the Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwich commercials). Herman and Lily prove to be every bit as bad as the teens. He's a pervert with a Playboy belt buckle who's intent on bedding the large-breasted Jan (Stacie Lambert) and she's incredibly lazy and eats steak while everyone else eats fish. The third counselor is Officer Barney Whitmore (Cliff Brand), whose son Sean was one of Angela's victims at the same camp back when it was still called Camp Rolling Hills. Tracy Griffith, sister of Melanie, co-stars as Marcia; the only nice girl at the camp.

The deaths are numerous and some of them are pretty creative; though the gore make-ups are strictly mediocre. Firecrackers are inserted into nostrils, a head is run over with a lawnmower, a girl is hiked up a flag pole then dropped on her head, someone snorts drain cleaner thinking it's cocaine, arms are ripped off with a jeep, several heads get lopped off and two die simultaneously when a contraption drops from the ceiling and sinks axes into their chests. The film's funniest moment however is when a topless girl streaks out of her tent screaming and immediately gets clubbed over the head with a tree branch. Springsteen even gets to do her own rap song at one point. High art this is not. Brainless entertainment it is.

In 1992, a fourth film (starring Carrie Chambers as Angela) was started but never finished. Scenes from it first ended up as an extra in a Sleepaway Camp "Survival Kit" box set released by Anchor Bay. In 2011, some bozo took the incomplete Part 4's footage, added numerous flashback sequences from the first three films and then released it to an unsuspecting public as Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor. The actual "official" fourth film was Return to Sleepaway Camp, which brought back original SC director Robert Hiltzik and stars Felissa Rose, Jonathan Tiersten and Paul DeAngelo. Though it was filmed in 2003, it took five long years for it be released and wasn't worth the wait as the film is absolutely terrible. A sixth film (tentatively titled Sleepaway Camp Reunion) was announced but nothing has happened yet.

★★

Slaughter High (1986)

... aka: April Fool's Day
... aka: Jolly Killer

Directed by:
George Dugdale
Mark Ezra
Peter Litten

It's April 1st at Doddsville County High School. School nerd Marty Rantzen (Simon Scuddamore) thinks he's lucked out when beauty Carol Manning (Caroline Munro) comes on to him and wants to have sex in the girl's locker room. But the joke's on Marty. After undressing, he pulls back the shower curtain to reveal a bunch of his classmates standing before him holding camera equipment and laughing. April Fool's! After shocking him with a car battery and dunking his head in the toilet a few times, the drill sergeant-esque gym coach (Marc Smith) walks in on the prank and decides to punish all involved with detention. To add insult to injury, some of the guys decide to get back at Marty by giving him a tainted joint that makes him sick, and screw around with some chemicals in the science lab, leading to a fire. A large, unsecured jar of nitric acid sitting high up on a shelf (in a high school science lab?) manages to fall, splashes Marty in the face and causes an explosion. He manages to survive the incident, but half of his face is now disfigured. Needless to say, he develops quite the grudge in the process.

Five years pass and everyone has gone on with their lives. Invitations arrive for their high school reunion. Carol is doing well as a model and actress and decides to pass on starring in a sleazy movie (producer Dick Randall cameos as her shady agent) to go to it. Dumb meathead Joey (Gary Martin) and his ditsy flame Stella (Donna Yaeger) have gotten hitched. Skip (Carmine Iannaccone) is riding around in an old jalopy, so apparently he's not doing too well. Nancy (Kelly Baker) has decided to hitchhike her way there. "Bad boy" Frank (Billy Hartman) shows up riding a motorcycle and wanting a beer. The even-less-defined Ted (Michael Saffran), Shirley (Josephine Scandi), Susan (Sally Cross) and Carl (John Segal) round out the group. Once everyone arrives they realize that Doddsville High has long ago closed and now sits in an overgrown field. They fail to notice that the only people to show up from their graduating class are the ones involved in pranking Marty years earlier. They also fail to realize that the reunion falls on the same exact day - April Fool's Day (which was the shooting title) - Marty was injured.

Night falls, a thunderstorm begins and everyone is forced inside the condemned building. They eventually come across a room all decked out for a party. There's plenty of food and drink and everyone's locker has been moved into the room and are stocked with belongings of theirs that turned up missing during their high school years. The only other locker in the room is Marty's. Inside is a rat and a yearbook he never got to collect because he was too busy going through months of plastic surgery and unsuccessful skin grafts. No one seems overly concerned about any of this, at least not enough to stop sucking down beer, smoking weed and snorting coke. To no one's surprise but their own, they've all been lured there by the physically and mentally scarred former nerd (decked out in a jester mask / costume) so that he can finally get his revenge. The school's janitor Digby (Jon Clark), now the caretaker, is around just long enough to become the first victim. Hey, he's the sole black dude in the cast, after all!

One guy drinks a toxic beer, his guts start spilling out and his stomach explodes, sending everyone heading for the exit as quickly as possible. Well, everyone except for a woman who gets sprayed with blood and decides to head for the shower room to clean up (!) instead. She's rewarded for her boneheaded action by melting down in an acid bath. Electrical wiring has been placed over the windows and doors to prevent anyone from escaping. The one guy who does manage to get out is impaled with a steel pole through the back of a car seat. A man working on fixing a tractor / lawn mower is chopped up when the thing gets dropped on him. Another couple decide to ease the tension by having sex and get electrified on some wired bedsprings. A head is impaled on a hook, a hand is nailed to the wall, arms are sliced with a pocket knife and there's an impalement, a hanging and a drowning in sewage.

As dumb as much of this is (knowing there's a killer in the same building, I have a hard time believing one person could just fall asleep, let along three people!), as bad as some of the acting is, as unbelievable as a cast of 30 / 40 year olds playing high school students is and as unoriginal as the premise is, this is actually one of the better 80s slasher flicks in my humble opinion. For starters, there's plenty of blood and gore on display, a nice variety of kills and some of the deaths are fairly creative. Add a little sex and nudity, a decent setting and some surprisingly funny dialogue and you've got one of the more entertaining films in this subgenre. Much of Harry Manfredini's score sounds exactly like his FRIDAY THE 13TH soundtrack. There's even a hockey mask Jason joke included.

Held back for release for a little while (it was filmed in 1984 and has a 1985 copyright date), this was filmed as April Fool's Day; a title that eventually had to be changed to avoid confusion with the American slasher "parody" of the same name. Both were released in 1986.

★★1/2

Frankenhooker (1990)

Directed by:

Frank Henenlotter

After his chubby girlfriend Elizabeth (Patty Mullen) is killed after being run over by the remote-control-operated power lawnmower that he invented, novice New Jersey mad scientist Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) comes up with a plan. He keeps his beloved's head back at his garage / lab on ice and takes a trip over to 42nd Street in New York City to search for the perfect body to attach it to. He also invents "supercrack;" a drug that makes anyone who smokes it blow up. A slew of topless hookers get it, smoke it and explode, giving Jeffrey all the spare body parts he needs. Once stitched together and brought to life with lightning, Frankenhooker is born and manages to escape to the streets for a series of low-brow adventures that usually end with someone dead. You may wonder how a movie with a premise like this could possibly miss out on the laughs, but this one just doesn't always strike the right chord. The humor itself is hit-or-miss and it's simply hard to buy silly, lighthearted, colorfully-presented slapstick one minute and then dehumanizing, tasteless gags directed at homeless people, prostitutes and drug addicts the next.

However, several of the cast members help to elevate the material a notch and keep it worth watching. Mullen (Penthouse Magazine's 1987 "Pet of the Year") gives a fantastic comic performance and shows a gift for physical comedy as the pieced together new girlfriend, complete with super strength, the memory of a hooker and the ability to make men's heads spin... literally. It's too bad her acting career didn't amount to much (she was previously seen in the obscure 1987 supernatural slasher Doom Asylum and little else) because she seemed to have a lot of natural comic potential and screen presence. Lorinz is also a big plus and perfects his sighs, grimaces, double takes and comic screams with a great Jersey accent and humorous over-the-top panache. He also had a small, scene-stealing role in STREET TRASH (1987), another very gory film shot in New York City that was in very bad taste.

Louise Lasser (Jeffrey's mom), Shirley Stoler (bartender) and John Zacherle (TV weatherman) all put in cameo appearances, as do Henenlotter film regulars Beverly Bonner (who has appeared in all six of the director's films) and Joe Gonzales (as Zorro, the pimp) and Vicki Darnell (as a hooker), both of whom had memorable roles in BRAIN DAMAGE. Some of the other hookers are played by Jennifer Delora (SAVAGE LUST), Playboy Playmate Charlotte J. Helmcamp, Penthouse models Kimberly Taylor and Susan Napoli and adult film actress Heather Hunter.

It was threatened with an X rating due to gratuitous nudity and gore, so it was released unrated instead. The original video box, which has actor Bill Murray's endorsement, had a button you could push that said one of two Frankenhooker catch phrases; "Wanna date" or "Lookin' for some action."

★★1/2