Summer Scaries

Sleepaway Camp

A Perfect Getaway

Happy July, dear readers and campers. Maybe it’s because we’re properly into Cancer season, or because Pride Month is over, or maybe it’s just a case of Dr. Lana Del Rey’s summertime sadness, but I can be rather emo in the Summer. The heat can make me lethargic, but one surefire way to inspire and motivate me is with (you guessed it) horror movies. We’re only 117 days away from Halloween, and I don’t know about you, but that makes me behind on my horror movie-watching schedule. To keep me chilled in these hot days of Summer I decided to turn down the lights (and the AC) and watch some scary movies set during the spookiest season of all: summertime. Scary movies set in the Summer are so common that you may have never taken note of it, but it’s this critic and Autumn’s opinion that the Summer season is the perfect time for horrors to take place. The kids are out of school, partying is at an all time high, which puts one’s guard down at an all time low. Friday the 13th, Jaws, Cabin in the Woods, IT, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jeepers Creepers, and I Know What You Did Last Summer all place their victims into a cruel summer, but since I’ve seen all of these, I went in search of something new. All signs were pointing to Robert Hiltzik’s unexpected cult-classic slasher Sleepaway Camp, which was filmed in under 5 weeks in 1983, and ended up making 30x more than what was spent to make it. While it follows the usual summertime slasher formula used in franchises like Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp found a way to be entirely unique and surprisingly unpredictable. Sleepaway Camp opens on a peaceful scene at a lake, where a family that seemingly consists of two dads and two children are enjoying a day in their canoe. But when two kids recklessly drive their motorboat directly into them, only the little girl, Angela appears to be left. Eight years later, Angela is living with her nice cousin Ricky and her bizarre, possibly insane Aunt, Dr. Martha Thomas, who was portrayed by an actress who seemed mildly insane herself. The trauma Angela has suffered has rendered her speechless, but Aunt Martha decides to send her off to Camp Arawak with Ricky, a youthful haven he attends every year (and one that the director himself went to.) Now, if you’re like me, the idea of going to camp as a child, away from your parents and your favorite foods and your reliable shower and air conditioning and creature comforts and being forced to hang with strange, smelly kids who are all at different levels of athleticism and puberty and self-discovery is horror enough. The idea of “camp” was literally used as a threat in my house when I was a kid, which kept me and my sister firmly in line. But the horror doesn’t really begin in Sleepaway Camp until the children arrive at Camp Arawak, and the staff of cooks and nearly-as-young-looking camp counselors are greeted by their screaming. Run by a stogie-smoking, capitalist creep played by Mike Kellin, it’s clear that Camp Arawak is not up to safety standards even before the killing begins. Because she doesn’t speak, Angela is immediately singled-out and made fun of by the Stephen King-level teenage bullies around her, despite her sweet cousin Ricky’s attempts to protect her. But the greatest threat to Angela appears to be the pedophile named Artie that was hired to work in the kitchen, who is swiftly drawn to Angela. Before he gets a chance to touch her, but after he’s made a creepy enough of an impression, Artie gets boiling water poured over his head which nearly kills him—though he’s not afforded that luxury. One of the ways Sleepaway Camp subverts your expectations is through its use of fascinatingly creative kills, that in some cases, do not even kill the unsuspecting victims, but left them in a more excruciating positions—like with the bully who gets mysteriously locked in an outhouse and swarmed by bees. While the budget was clearly low in Sleepaway Camp, the practical special effects and meticulously grotesque makeup was insanely impressive. I’ll admit that I was caught off guard, because so many campy (so-to-speak) quote unquote “cult-classics” of this era—Friday the 13th included—are not actually scary, or even all that memorable (imo). But Sleepaway Camp shocked me with every ridiculously brutal kill, every disarming use of cheesy dialogue, and by the end I really couldn’t predict who the killer was. {If you do plan to watch Sleepaway Camp, I do not recommend Googling it, as just about every fun-fact and anecdote about this film is full of spoilers.} I was addicted to this film’s twisted sense of humor, and how authentically cruel this cast of adolescents was written to be. I was in love with many of Camp Arawak’s buff, hairy counselors, and I will forever be grateful to this film’s wardrobe department for only supplying them with crop tops and the shortest shorts known to man. And even though there are elements of this film that might not hold up, I can understand why Sleepaway Camp is so beloved, and how they managed to follow it up with four sequels. The ending of this film is rather shocking, and controversial, depending on who you speak to. I cannot reveal how or why here, but it’s certainly worth reading about, after you watch the film for yourself. Between the gay couple at the beginning of the film, the cunty side-ponytail of the meanest girl Judy, and the constant flow of hormonal, excited boys piling on top of one another, Sleepaway Camp is a legendary queer horror movie that continues the great tradition of queer horror on this blog. I’m not quite sure what I expected, but Sleepaway Camp far-surpassed my expectations, and accomplished what so many slashers have tried and failed to do: and that’s earning the title of classic. It took me longer than I thought it would find a decently creepy follow up Sleepaway Camp, but through rigorous research (going to the 2nd page of Google) and trial and error (watching a couple mid movies), I stumbled upon a forgotten thriller from 2009, David Twohy’s A Perfect Getaway. A Perfect Getaway occupies space in a specific sub-genre within the sub-genre of Summer Scaries, and that’s the too-often-underutilized honeymoon horror. The movie follows Cliff and Cydney (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich), who are celebrating their honeymoon in Hawaii. Instead of having a White Lotus or Blue Crush kind of resort experience, though, these overly cheery newlyweds opt for a riskier activity: hiking to remote beaches. Before they begin their hike, Cliff and Cydney have to drive deeper into the woods and cliff-sides of this vast island, where they meet a couple trying to hitchhike. This less-cheery couple, Kale and Cleo (played by Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton), are giving off a different vibe from our protagonists, one that makes them seem a bit more scrappy and suspicious and untrustworthy. This suspicion doesn’t, for some reason, carry over to the next couple that our protagonists meet: the similarly scrappy Nick and Gina (Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez.) Though the country bumpkin-ish quirks of Nick and Gina sometimes grate against the rich normie-ness of Cliff and Cydney, these two couples learn to get along very well, and end up hiking together to find more spots of hidden paradise. The trouble arises when they run into other tourists, who inform the couples that another couple, also on their honeymoon, was just murdered nearby. In a rare case of tourist-on-tourist crime, Cydney, but mostly Cliff, begins to feel paranoid about both of the couples they’ve come in contact with, and this mystery in paradise really kicks off. A Perfect Getaway is not perfect, there is some odd editing and coloring, and there are several questionable lines of dialogue—not including each time Timothy Olyphant called himself “a goddamned American jedi”—but I was very pleasantly surprised by this nearly-forgotten film. Writer-director David Twohy did an excellent job of keeping his protagonists and his audience guessing, and took every opportunity for Steve Zahn’s somewhat pompous screenwriter character to be shit on with meta humor. Even elements that initially seemed off-putting, like the annoyingly joyful characterization of Milla Jovovich’s role, eventually had some sort of pay off, one I won’t dare spoil here. A Perfect Getaway has some pretty decent twists and turns, ones that may not be up to our increasingly-jaded 2023 expectations, but it was still sufficiently suspenseful and unpredictable, and only unintentionally-funny at a couple of moments. It was wild to see Milla Jovovich play such a normie but if you’re looking for a hidden horror gem with lots of hotties and also thee short king Steve Zahn, look no further than The Perfect Getaway. Both of tonight’s films really hit the spot and satisfied my seasonal desire for summertime horror, so I recommend both the tried-and-true Sleepaway Camp and the lesser-known A Perfect Getaway for anyone else trying to keep cool with creepy movies this time of year. Thanks for reading along! You stay cool (and alert) out there, campers.