TEENAGE WASTELAND, oh, yeah… TEENAGE WASTELAND!

Oh, hi, Enemaniacs. You’ve caught me singing along to one of my favorite songs from The Who, “Baba O’Riley.” And that brings us to week #6 here at B-Movie Enema’s summer-long theme of Camp Crappa Buttawipe! This week, we bounce back into the Sleepaway Camp franchise with Sleepaway Camp III: Baba O’Riley… er… I mean Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland!

There’s not much more to say about the behind-the-scenes business that wasn’t covered last month when I talked about the first sequel. Both sequels were made back-to-back to save on overall production costs. The first of the two movies was the more expensive of the two, coming in at about a million and a half bucks. This movie used the rest of the $2 million that was granted to make the two movies. Both films were written by Fritz Gordon, and his appreciation for playing around with character names is still on display here. The last film used the first names of the Brat Pack and other young stars of the era. This film uses character names from sources like West Side Story, The Munsters, and The Brady Bunch.

Because the two sequels were shot back-to-back with the same writer writing both scripts, this film is also directed by Michael A. Simpson. Simpson would say later that the decision to steer the series into a more comedic angle, with a focus on self-referential and dark humor in particular, was due to something I’ve mentioned quite a bit in past reviews. You see, the slasher subgenre of horror was played out. It wasn’t really working for people anymore. So, you don’t really want to change the genre these sequels are operating in compared to the first entry, but you definitely aren’t going to be particularly successful in copying the exact tone, feel, and trappings of the slasher genre.

With the production of this movie picking right up from the second, we get Pamela Springsteen back as Angela. Considering how the last movie ends, and how the only appearance of any characters from that movie comes by way of flashback, we have to assume that Molly was killed by Angela on the road after flagging down the truck that Angela took over from the annoying chain-smoking cowgirl. There is also a time jump in play here. The movies were released one year apart, and so the movies are set one year apart.

So I think we should just jump right in and get out there in the fields where we will fight for our meals and get our backs into our living.

As mentioned, this movie picks up one year later. It starts with a girl named Maria Nacastro. It’s important for her to be nude because it indicates something important about the group of campers that Angela is going to be picking off one by one in this movie. Nope, wait… Sorry, I meant to say it was important for everyone to understand why she is yelling at her mom and dad through the walls of her apartment on the morning that she is leaving for camp… That nude bit is just kind of a bonus for the cheesecake.

The campers this time around are a mix of lower-class kids and higher-class kids. All of these kids are brought together from diverse areas. Most of the troubled kids are from cities, while the upper-class kids are from suburbs or fly-over states. They are headed to a camp called Camp New Horizons to promote sharing and/or caring or some such shit.

Angela killed Maria by running her over with a garbage truck and crushing her with the rest of the trash in the back. She styled her hair like Maria, dressed “tough,” and got picked up with the rest of the lower-class kids to go to New Horizons. At the camp, that’s where we get all that backstory about the diverse group. There are a couple of funny jokes mixed in here on the sly… One is how one of the “good” kids is crushing on one of the “bad” kids. When she tells one of the other upper-class kids how she thinks that “Tony guy is hot,” the other girl just scoffs and says he’s Mexican.

That’s some pretty good satire about how class then leads to racism at a time when it was much less connected than it is today, after three and a half more decades of study about classism and its effects.

Anyway, the other joke concerns an interaction between Angela and the news reporter doing the report on Camp New Horizons. The reporter says that Angela looks older than the other campers. Angela says that it’s true, but she did bad drugs. The reporter asks her who Angela might know to score some coke. Angela says there’s a machine in the mess hall (referring to capital C Coke).

Angela gives the reporter a little bag of Comet and sends her on her way to death.

So that’s one death by way of garbage truck and one by snorting Comet. Angela is definitely expanding her horizons at Camp New Horizons. Anyway, it’s onto the first order of business at the camp. It’s no real surprise that the two groups don’t really get along. The underprivileged kids have no interest in getting to know the upper-class kids. In fact, they are downright antagonistic. Actually, the kids from the city barely get along with each other as two get into a fight that kicks off with some racism.

Also, the underprivileged kids go by the names from West Side Story, while the upper-class kids go by the names from The Brady Bunch. Lily and Herman Miranda bought the site that, one year ago, was Camp Rolling Hills and turned it into New Horizons. So there are some remnants from the previous movie’s plots that are going to kind of haunt Angela throughout this movie. For example, the girls’ cabin has “Fuck Angela Baker” spraypainted onto a wall. The biggest thing that is there to haunt Angela, though, is the arrival of a local cop, Officer Barney Whitmore. Barney was the cop who was originally involved in arresting Angela at Camp Arawak, and whose son, Sean, was killed at Camp Rolling Hills.

I should also mention that Herman is played by Michael J. Pollard. Pollard is the kind of guy you’ve seen all over the place and in a lot of diverse things. Whenever you see a guy in a movie who you think might just be some sort of extra-dimensional imp, it’s Michael J. Pollard. Pollard’s career started off hot in the 60s. He appeared in the “Miri” episode of Star Trek, and a year later, he played C.W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde, a performance that earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. His early successes in film and TV in the 60s led to dozens of roles over the next 45 years in big studio films and small indie films.

Oh, and speaking of looking like an inter-dimensional imp, there was no more perfect actor to be chosen to play Mr. Mxyzptlk in two episodes of 1989’s Superboy series.

Alright, the campers are broken off into groups with Tony and Marcia in the Officer Whitmore group. Tony gives Whitmore some grief over being a cop and being allowed to bend and break rules, but after he explains what happened to his son, Tony shows he may not be such a bad kid after all, and a little bit of a bond gets formed between the cop and the whole group he’s leading.

In Herman’s group, which is where Angela is assigned, he sends some of the kids to the lake to fish for lunch while he stays back to make good on some flirting he had with sexy upper-class Jan during the orientation. And… I have very conflicted feelings about this. Jan (Stacie Lambert) looks fucking great. But I’m not sure I ever wanted to see Mr. Mxyzptlk sucking on titties. Yet, here we are.

I wonder why Stacie Lambert never appeared in any other movies… Eh, let’s move on.

Angela finds Herman and Jan fucking about. She uses a tree branch to beat on Herman while he tries to explain that his old lady doesn’t give him any of that sweet, sweet puss anymore. Angela eventually stabs Herman in the mouth with the branch. She then beats Jan to death with the branch and hides them in Jan’s tent.

Over in Whitmore’s camp, Tony made everyone burgers. When Marcia needs to go take a shit, Whitmore tells Tony to accompany her, presumably to watch her for safety, and not watch her, you know, pinch a loaf. They talk a little bit and start to get a little comfy with each other. They even have a cute little moment of being scared about hearing something in the woods, only for it to be a baby raccoon.

Angela isn’t done killing people in her group. One guy who constantly lights firecrackers and scares her by throwing them at her gets his comeuppance. Angela puts a firecracker in his nose and blows his face off. She bashes in the head of the guy who likes to graffiti everything with a tree branch (Angela really loves that tree branch). She pulls him into a tent and sets him on fire. She then goes to Lily’s camp, telling her and the Asian bitch who is always being, well, a bitch to everyone else that they are supposed to switch groups. Angela kills the bitchy girl by cutting her head off with an axe.

Angela’s really picking up the pace this morning with the killings because there are a lot of fucking characters, and we’re almost halfway through the movie.

At Lily’s camp, the rich bitch, Cindy, calls a black guy named Riff some pretty serious racist shit. She then tells Angela that she bets that he would really get off killing a white girl. So, while playing a trust game where Angela can blindfold and tie Cindy’s hands behind her back, she can dish out some social justice. You know, I can kind of get behind some of Angela’s murders. She kills the creepy old guy screwing around with the girl, who I think is technically supposed to be, like, seventeen. She kills a racist. These are good things in my book.

Anyway, Angela runs Cindy up the flagpole and lets go of the rope so she comes carreening down to the ground to her death.

When Lily gives Angela some chores to complete for her, she has some flashbacks of Camp Rolling Hills, when she used to sing “Happy Camper.” The flashbacks began while she was walking through the kitchen of the mess hall. I feel like this would have been a great time to give some flashbacks to the first movie when she dumped the pedo cook into a big pile of boiling water. Instead, she can only think of that second movie. It’s almost like these sequels are barely connected to the original.

Angela and Bobby are tied together for another trust exercise. They are sent to go fishing. Bobby tells Angela she is nice and he kind of likes her. He especially finds it hot to be tied up with her. After forcing himself on her, Angela says, she’ll take care of Lily, so she and Bobby can meet by the old cabins. Looks like he’ll be the next boy who likes Angela to catch a bad case of cooties from her.

And by cooties, I mean dead.

She also has to deal with Riff. After spending two hours fishing, Angela tells Riff it would only be fair that he clean the fish she caught. He puts his gun to her face, so he’s most definitely going to have to deal with that. I like Riff because whenever Lily asks him to do something, he’s always responding with something to the effect of, “No fucking way!” Lily then just tells someone else to do whatever she asked Riff to do.

Angela convinces Lily to do the trust exercise that she did with Cindy. To convince her, Angela uses her lie about Cindy being back in the cabin resting from a headache to talk her into being led there. Angela noticed that Lily had been looking at travel magazines. So she asks her if she and Herman are planning a trip. All the while, she leads Lily to the compost pile, where she plans to bury Lily alive. She sings the “Happy Camper” song while filling the hole with dirt. Angela leaves Lily’s head exposed and tells her about how Herman fucks around on her. She then starts up a lawnmower and kills her Caligula-style.

Bobby meets Angela that evening. She ties him to a tree. Angela attaches the end of the rope to a Jeep. She drives off and kills Bobby. Of all the murders in this, this is kind of her lamest. It doesn’t exactly say exactly how she kills him. I assume she exploded his ribcage or something, but it’s unclear.

When she returns to where Riff is in his tent, Angela leaves him a pretty cringy tape of her rapping. She collapses the tent onto Riff, and she uses a tent spike and a mallet to drive it into Riff, killing him. Now that only leaves Whitmore’s group. Angela tells Whitmore that she is supposed to switch camps with Marcia. She picks Marcia because she sees the girl making out with Tony.

Angela tells Whitmore and Marcia about how Herman fucks the campers, and Lily is lazy. Whitmore doesn’t exactly believe her, but he doesn’t exactly know the Mirandas all that well. Marcia decides to go see for herself, and Angela tells her that Lily is sitting out back right now, just doing nothing. Marcia finds Lily’s decapitated body.

Whitmore goes to take a look and later tells Marcia to run to the highway. Angela pulls out Riff’s gun and confronts Whitmore. She tells him about how he looks just like his son when he gets mad. He asks how she plans to try to kill him. He recounts the different ways people were killed in the previous movie. Angela just says she’s going to use a gun, and shoots him dead.

Angela uses the Jeep to chase Marcia. She eventually captures the girl. Angela gets the three remaining campers, Anita, Greg, and Tony, together and ties them together to play a game. She reveals she is, indeed, Angela Baker, and she’s killed everyone else. She hasn’t killed Marcia yet. That’s the object of this game. They have one minute to search the three cabins to find which one Marcia is being held in.

They find her in the second cabin, but it’s booby-trapped to kill Anita and Greg with axes.

This is easily the best kill. It’s not just a two-fer. It’s a clever booby trap that we hadn’t really seen from Angela before. Since all three campers were tied together, Tony was kind of trapped. On both sides of him, the other campers are pinned ot the wall by the axes. It’s good stuff and kind of came out of nowhere. Again, largely due to Angela never really setting up booby traps like this before.

So we’re really at the big climax now. Angela comes in and tells Tony that he solved the game with seven seconds to go. She tells them that they are good kids and she thinks they make a good couple. She plans on leaving, but tells them that the phone lines have been cut, but there is a pay phone up the road, about three miles. She says “Bye!” in a real chipper tone and leaves the cabin.

Marcia frees herself and tears off after Angela, and manages to stab Angela several times before Tony pulls her off.

Angela apparently bleeds out and dies. While Tony and Marcia sit together in a cop car as they investigate everything, he talks about moving to Ohio so they can get married. She reveals she already has a boyfriend, but, hey, he can visit.

Meanwhile, Angela is in an ambulance. The EMT tells the cop that she is still alive. The cop says she doesn’t deserve to live. The EMT agrees it would be easy to make it so she doesn’t survive. While the cop finds out where they are in relation to the hospital, Angela wakes up and kills the EMT and the cop. When the driver calls back to find out what’s going on back there, Angela says, “Just taking care of business.”

Sleepaway Camp III is the first of the series that I honestly can’t really recommend. The first movie is just a bonkers cult classic. It’s full of (no pun intended) campy fun. The second movie is elevated by how Pamela Springsteen leans into playing this unhinged character. Plus, Renee Estevez is cute as a button. The shift in tone of the second movie is fresh. While not everything about that works, this movie has the same major issue as Meatballs did last week.

Yeah, it’s maybe a little cheap to say that Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland has a lack of a plot problem, but, look, I can’t lie in these reviews. You people come here to read these reviews to get the truth, or at least the honest opinion of some dipshit. You know how some people used to make movies on the very cheap by buying up all the ends of film that weren’t used by other productions? That’s a great way to kind of describe what’s going on here.

The characters aren’t as interesting. Angela just feels like she’s fulfilling an obligation. There is no plot. The second movie isn’t exactly drenched in plot either, but there were a few things to find charming about it. There were scenes in which Angela is now trying to fit in with a new group of campers, but this time as a counselor, not a camper. There were nice scenes between Molly and Angela that seemed like Angela was actually making a friend. There was just more going on with the previous movie.

This feels very assembly line in terms of getting Angela back to a camp where she will start picking people off. There are more people at this camp to kill, so let’s just get to it. It just isn’t that satisfying. It’s not without a few okay quirks. Angela delivering some sense of justice to the girl who is an ugly racist, killing the camp owner who likes fucking teens… This is okay. It just feels tired by this point. If nothing ever came after Sleepaway Camp II, I think you could say this turned out to be a pretty good duology.

But if we think the series is headed downhill, it hits serious trouble in the “official” fourth entry. We’ll get to that next month. Next week, though, we’re back to kooky comedy times. Join me as we go to the summer of 2001 and sweat out a Wet Hot American Summer!

Until then, I need to go check on my buddy, Supes, because it’s very likely an inter-dimensional imp got released when Michael J. Pollard sucked on that girl’s titties.