Camp Cinewhack Festival
Directed by Robert Hiltzik
With Desiree Gould, Robert Earl Jones, Mike Kellin
Rated R, 84 minutes, DCP
Camp Cinewhack counselors Paul Rust and Dr. Anna Wald who are both a doer and both scheduled to appear via Zoom for a post-film discussion!
A great boon for aficionados of slashers films, or at least those writing headlines about them, is the handy dovetail that (1) they are often set at summer camp (e.g., Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, around which this capsule festival is curated) and (2) they are steeped in their own gothic brand of camp. And, for sure, Sleepaway Camp is endlessly campy—a mix that's both sumptuous and dumpy, just like the seat of Artie's parts. If one thinks of Susan Sontag's quote that camp is the sensibility of failed seriousness, then campy horror films might be the sensibility of failed frights. That's where Sleepaway Camp took up its bunk-next to that centerfielding and knife-wielding nerd Mozart (Willy Kuskin)—with few if any audience jumps or screams surrounding its ill-fated campers. While not exactly successful in the scare department, it doesn't swap out fright for self-awareness (e.g., Scream), gross-outs (e.g., Saw), or comedy (e.g., Severance) (or other one-word 'S' horror films). Rather, it goes to its walk-in and pulls from the shelf Douglas Sirk and Roger Corman and blends them seamlessly for an unseemly and sleepy pastoral with occasional rolling thunder and a world-famous lightning strike. You get pathos, you get levity, you get fooled by little schemers, you get to hear line readings like they're straight out of Waiting for Guffman community theatre, you learn how to hit homers by Mel, you get Hey Bobareebobbed, you get a genre transcension by half that remains true to its rotted roots, and you get to experience camp in all its overcast glory.
Camp Cinewhack is a capsule festival of campy camp horror films curated by camp counselors Paul Rust and Dr. Anna Wald.