Customer Reviews

Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I woke up at 3 in the morning and turned on HBO and watched this and the clever Angela Baker is Back! Ohhhhhh I'm a happy camper! She returns back to the depressing camp And got more good kills but there are some scenes with her flash backs to let you know how she became this way! You must think I'm an idiot for giving it 4 stars but early in the morning, it could have a BIG affect on you!!!!

Basically, the killer Angela has returned and is killing off all of the bratty girls and boys while they are setting up camp.

This film puts the 'camp' in Sleepaway Camp. Pure, cheeseball entertainment. It's worth the 5 bucks that's being charged!

This is the 3rd installment to the "Sleepaway Camp" series and you guessed it Angela is back. If you are unfamilar with this series see my reviews.

We left off last time at Camp Rolling Hills where Angela went on her killing spree! Now the camp has been sold to Herman and Lilly Miranda and they have re-opened it as "Camp New Horizonz".

This time we bring together inner city kids with the high class teens to begin a lesson on learning how to cope with one another. Sharing in the wonders of the great outdoors.

It doesn't take long before Angela starts to repeat her history and the murders begin. Will anyone but Angela survive this time...

Again the gore does not let down our horror fans and Angela finds new ways to off her victims.

If you enjoyed the first two movies you have to see this one. I will say the first is my favorite with a unsuspected ending! That is a must see!

<strong>Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland</strong> (Michael A. Simpson, 1989)

After suffering through the first two movies in the Sleepaway Camp franchise, I have to wonder what on earth possessed me to go onto the third, other than a burning desire to finish the box set and get it out of my house. But I have to admit...despite the third being the lowest-budget movie of them all, and despite it being basically shot as leftovers from the second film (the two movies were shot back-to-back with the same locations, etc., an old Roger Corman "how to make movies for five hundred bucks" trick), I think it's the strongest of the three, for reasons we'll delve into eventually.

Plot: a year after the events of the second film, an enterprising older couple, Herman and Lily Miranda (Michael J. Pollard, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his work in <em>Bonnie and Clyde</em>, and <em>Norma Rae</em>'s Sandra Dorsey) and uses the spot for an experimental sort of camp: it will bring together teenagers from both sides of the tracks in an attempt to get them to better understand one another's lives. You can already tell how well this is going to work. In any case, Angela slips in by offing one of the inner-city campers with a garbage truck in the movie's funniest scene, then catching her ride back to Angela's old stomping grounds, where she quickly discovers that, yet again, the campers don't live up to her expectations. (At one point, in frustration, she yells, "why did I expect things to be different this year?" Indeed.) As with the last film, where she had Molly, she discovers one camper with a generally sweet nature, Marcia (<em>The First Power</em>'s Tracy Griffith). Maybe she'll finally find someone worth saving?

The Sleepaway Camp movies were always about cardboard cutouts getting killed, but there's actually a glimmer of characterization in this one between Marcia and one of the underprivileged kids, Tony (<em>2012</em>'s Mark Oliver), with whom she strikes up a tentative relationship. (I don't know if it's a spoiler, so I'll tell you to skip to the end of this parenthesis if you don't wanna know: there's a <em>great</em> one-liner at the end that shows just how off Angela is in reading Marcia's character. But if you're not paying attention, you might miss it.) I guess it couldn't be helped, since the idea behind Fritz Godron's script pretty much forced examination of some social issues--and did so in at least slightly more sensitive a way than did the idiocy of the first film. I wish there'd been more of that sort of thing; you can't put an Asian woman who goes by the name "Arab" in a movie and <em>not</em> explore that, though they do here--but someone at least made the effort in a few places. Don't get me wrong, it's just as dumb as the first two, but at least it's dumb with a scrim of substance. **

Will people never learn?!? If a summer camp is closed down due to a massacre, don't reopen the darn place. You're not hiding anything by changing the name of the campgrounds (in this case, from Rolling Hills to New Horizons), it's not going to help if one of the camp counsellors is a police officer (whose son was decapitated in Part 2) and you can't rule out the killer coming back to the scene of the crime if still on the loose (yes, Angela is back, incognito as another scheduled camper whose identity she stole... after running her over with a trash service truck!). Oh sure, the theme involving bringing upper and lower class teens together as one is a nice thought, but will it matter if they're all dead at the end of the day? Pamela Springsteen playfully reprises her role with ease, doing away with anyone involved with fornication, criminal mischief and/or just bad attitudes. It brings a strange kind of joy to me seeing a psycho rip a person's face to shreds with a lawn mower blade one minute, then skipping through the woods and humming with glee the next. Note: Legacy Entertainment just shouldn't be in the DVD distribution business. The audio track often has a kind of hollow sound to it, much of the time sounding similar to, say, an airplane taking off in the distance. At least the audio is complete, as opposed to their release of Part 2. 6.5/10 (for the movie itself) 4/10 (for Legacy's release)

Note: This review is for the Legacy edition of the film and not the newer version, where the cover is just a close-up on breast and a knife. I prefer this version because the cover is cool, although it looks like the cover or part 2 of the remastered dvds.

I highly enjoy this series and I figured i'd complete the set by buying this dvd. Angela is back and killing more campers, what else would it be about? While the first one was shocking and full of twists, the second was nothing but fun. The third is decent but nothing worth going out of your way for, maybe if you need to complete your collection or just want something to watch because you've seen everything else. The kills were good but not to graphic, I thought this dvd might have edited some deaths scenes but it's the way they were filmed. The lawnmower death would have been better if they showed a little blood. Overall, the picture quality is good but the film isn't. I got it just to complete a collection.