You may remember that last year no-one could be bothered to even try to kill psychotic sex-op patient Angela (Pamela Springsteen) when she did-in seventeen (nineteen it says here) people at Camp Rolling Hill. So you’ve only yourselves to blame now she’s come back, running over troubled teenager Maria with a garbage truck, shoving her bloodied carcass in the back and pinching her identity before heading off to her old killing ground, now re-opened as Camp New Horizons, home to some sociological project encouraging friendship between rich, upper/middle-class brats and filthy, lower-class gang-banging junkies. Angela is one of the drop-outs.
Although Sleepaway Camp 3 contains most of the same elements as its predecessor (and was actually filmed back-to-back with it), it’s severely lacking one thing: Gore. Not that I’m saying it isn’t gory, because it is – it’s just not gory enough for a movie featuring a guy getting his arms pulled off with a 4x4 during an outdoor bondage session! This Anchor Bay disc features a selection of deleted scenes, all gorier versions of the movie’s murders, and it’s a great pity that these weren’t cut back into the movie. You know, when you see a fat old hag buried up to her neck in rotting garbage before having her head run over with a Flymo, you want the genuine article. To make up for SC3’s watered down violence, Angela has taken to using Commando style one-liners – you know, “Dead serious”, “Lost her head”, that kind of stuff. Some of them aren’t even funny… Well, they are a bit but only because they’re not.
As well as fighting a battle against sex, drugs and heavy metal, Angela is now taking a stand against bigotry, literally smashing in the head of one posh little bitch who uses the word “nigger”. On the other hand, the filmmakers themselves aren’t averse to racial stereotyping. OK, so the Mexican guy isn’t that bad, but the black guy who carries both flick-knife and a gun, says “fuck” every other word, and listens constantly to old-skool (I mean really old-skool) rap on his second-rate ghetto-blaster, which itself can’t carry much more street-cred than a Marconi wireless ,would surely have more than a few do-gooders foaming at the mouth (there are actually two other black characters here, although their significance in the film is limited), even more so than they would about paedophilic camp councillor Herman; he’s around sixty, looks and acts like a genuine ‘tard and wears a Playboy belt-buckle whilst he’s shagging one of the teens (the fact that it’s consensual is even more repugnant). It’s a real pity he dies such an unimaginative death.
Certainly, Sleepaway Camp 3 pales in comparison to SC2, although on the up side Angela looks really fit here with her blonde “Bark At The Moon” era Ozzy haircut and denims. Yeah, it’s worth watching for that, and there are plenty of other reasons to watch this. It’s very fast paced, fairly exciting and it’s proper mong-material so you don’t have to think too much whilst watching. But as that newscaster said at the beginning of the film before snorting a line of Vim: “Violence sells, and you’ve gotta give the people what they want.” I didn’t get what I wanted.
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