Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland

Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland
Directed by	Michael A. Simpson
Written by	Fritz Gordon Robert Hiltzik (characters)
Starring	Pamela Springsteen Tracy Griffith Mark Oliver Kim Wall Kyle Holman Daryl Wilcher Haynes Brooke Michael J. Pollard
Music by	James Oliverio
Release dates	August 4, 1989 (1989-08-04)
Running time	80 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$465,000

Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland also known as Nightmare Vacation III is a 1989 American slasher film and the second sequel to Sleepaway Camp written by Fritz Gordon and directed by Michael A. Simpson. It stars Pamela Springsteen, Tracy Griffith, Michael J. Pollard, Mark Oliver, and Haynes Brooke. The film features a transgender former camper and killer targeting teenagers at another summer camp.

Plot

The film opens with Maria (Kashina Kessler) heading to camp. However, she is chased into an alleyway by a large truck, driven by serial killer Angela Baker (Pamela Springsteen), before being run over. Angela disposes of the body in a trash compactor, before posing as Maria and boarding the bus to Camp New Horizon, which was once Camp Rolling Hills where Angela massacred campers the year before. After arriving, news reporter Tawny Richards (Randi Layne) interviews the many campers who are taking part in "an experiment in sharing", seeing different social classes living together. Tawny soon asks Angela to get her some cocaine, however Angela gives her Ajax cleanser instead, which kills Tawny when she snorts it.

After the campers have settled in, camp councilors Herman (Michael J. Pollard), Lily (Sandra Dorsey) and Officer Barney Whitmore (Cliff Brand), who Angela realizes is the father of a previous victim, split the campers into three groups, who they will be camping with over the next few days. Angela is placed in a group with Herman, Snowboy (Kyle Holman), Peter (Jarret Beal) and Jan (Stacie Lambert). Angela goes fishing with Snowboy and Peter, but soon gets annoyed by them setting off firecrackers and returns to camp, only to find Herman and Jan having sex. Angela impales Herman through the mouth with a log, before bashing Jan's head in. Angela hides the bodies from Snowboy and Peter, who continue to annoy her throughout the day. At night, Angela sets off a firecracker in Peter's nose, killing him, before hitting Snowboy with a log and burning him alive, along with the bodies.

The next morning, Angela travels to Lily's campsite, where Bobby (Haynes Brooke), Cindy (Kim Wall), Riff (Daryl Wilcher) and Arab (Jill Terashita) are camping. Angela tells Lily that Herman told her she was to switch places with Arab. As Angela escorts Arab to the other camp, she decapitates her with an axe. When Angela returns to camp, an argument breaks out between Cindy and Riff, before Lily sets the campers out on a trust building exercise. Blindfolded, Cindy doesn't realize that Angela, having grown tired of the girl's whiny and bigoted behavior, has attached her to the flag pole. Angela raises Cindy into the air, before letting her drop from a high height, killing her. Angela covers up her death by telling Lily that she has returned to main camp. In another game, Angela is tied to Bobby, but while fishing he attempts to kiss her, annoying Angela who tells him to later meet her at the main cabin. Returning to camp, Angela convinces Lily to go check on Cindy with her, however Angela buries Lily, up to her neck, in a trash hole, before running over her head with a lawnmower. Angela then waits for Bobby to arrive, who she ties to a tree and procedes to rip his arms off with a jeep. Angela then murders Riff by stabbing him with tent spikes.

The following morning, Angela travels to the remaining camp, where Barney, Marcia (Tracy Griffith), Tony (Mark Oliver), Anita (Sonya Maddox) and Greg (Chung Yen Tsay) are camping. Angela tells Barney she is to switch with Marcia, but Marcia objects. As Barney accompanies Angela and Marcia to the other camp, Angela is forced to fake a leg injury. Barney tends to Angela at the main camp, but Marcia discovers Lily's body, and flees, while Barney discovers Angela's identity, but she shoots him dead. Angela catches up with Marcia in the jeep, and captures her. Angela returns to Tony, Anita and Greg that night and ties them together, telling them they are playing a trust game. However, Angela shows them the body of Barney, and forces them to find Marcia in one of the cabins. However, Angela has set up a booby trap that kills Greg and Anita. Angela decides to let Marcia and Tony live, however while departing, Angela is attacked by Marcia who stabs her numerous times.

After Marcia and Tony summon the police to the camp, Tony is disgusted to discover Marcia already has a boyfriend. Meanwhile, Angela is being driven to hospital in an ambulance, where a cop and paramedic plot to kill her, but Angela wakes and stabs them to death with a syringe. When the ambulance driver asks what is going on, Angela weakly replies "Just taking care of business", and falls unconscious.

Cast

• Pamela Springsteen as Angela Baker. The lead character and antagonist of the Sleepaway Camp series, she was actually the boy Peter Baker who was then forced into becoming his aunt's "daughter". Since the first movie, she has killed many teens and youths, in her preferred haunting, the campgrounds of Camp Arawak, which has since seen many renamings and murders. She is motivated to kill whether it be out of being annoyed or offended, learning that a person is that of an unsavory background and character or if they are simply in her way.
• Tracy Griffith as Marcia Holland. An cheerful young teen from Defiance, Ohio. An easy going band girl and rather innocent than the most of the group, she immediately has a crush on Tony, and luckily gets to spend the majority of the trip with him. However, she's not as innocent as she appeared: once the two survive Angela's terror, it is revealed that she has a boyfriend and had no intentions of having a real relationship with Tony.
• Mark Oliver as Tony DeRaro. A seemingly tough Latino teen from East Los Angeles, who actually has a calm personality with a weathered outlook on life. Well behaving, he appears to also get into trouble, though it is usually out of a sense of mutual respect and justice. It is later revealed that he is a reforming gang member who desperately seeks getting out of his situation and is using the retreat to go underground from his hometown and reevaluate his life.
• Kim Wall as Cindy Hammersmith. A bubbly and somewhat perky teen from Dunwoody, Georgia. A cheerleader and rich daughter, she reveals to have a double side to her upper class life, enjoying the vices of materialistic sex and drug use and despite her kindly air, she is a petty, snotty, chauvinistic and spoiled girl, as well as being raised in a family of racist bigots. She dies screaming for mercy as she lands on her head as she falls from a flagpole that Angela attaches to her belt loop from behind and raised her to a fatal elevation.
• Daryl Wilcher as Riff. His real name unknown, he is an urban raised African American teenager from Detroit. An arrogant, egocentric, selfish and even violent youth, he appears to be a nasty gangster delinquent, carrying weapons on him, blaring music in the most inappropriate of times, harboring a level of racism and disrespect for authority figures, as well as anti social behavior, enjoys overt sexual and ultraviolent indulgences, and seems to have no level of patience, getting in fights easily with other campers. He meets his end as Angela distracts him with a dissing rap tape she made, before she pins him down with tent stakes as she makes sure one gets to his brain.
• Sandra Dorsey as Lily Miranda. One of the main founders and counselors of Camp New Horizons. While attempting to be motherly and open to the campers, she reveals to be a short sighted, rather apathetic, self-serving and disillusioned woman who appears to have reopened the camp purely out of profit under the guise of a moral inspired project to help understand troubled teenagers and lower the barriers between more privileged youths, all while cutting expenses through denying necessities and needed services and holds an apparently naive and ignorant understanding of teenagers. She also appears to be extremely hypocritical and lazy, eating steaks while demanding campers get their own food by fishing and demanding campers to fix coffee for her and throwing out her trash. She is brutally killed when she is blindfolded and trapped in her self made landfill, before being buried up to her head with dirt and eventually massacred with a lawnmower.
• Michael J. Pollard as Herman Miranda. The husband of Lily Miranda, as well as one of the main founders and counselors of Camp New Horizons, a camp aiming to bring teenagers of all levels of life to understand each other. He is a lecherous and unmotivated, as well as apathetic and burnt out old man, who enjoys sleeping with women and teenagers, as he doesn't find his wife attractive anymore and shows no enthusiasm for his current undertakings of Camp New Horizons. As his sexual escapades with Jan are interrupted by Angela, he is assaulted and beaten to the ground before his head is impaled through the mouth by a jagged branch.
• Cliff Brand as Officer Barney Whitmore. A police officer who volunteers for a position as a counselor at Camp New Horizons, and also does not detract from his duties, as he helped put Riff under control during a fight. His main reasons for becoming a counselor is to spend the quality time he never could with his own son Sean, as he was decapitated by Angela and to protect the current campers from such a grisly fate as well, being also driven by a murderous vendetta against the serial killer. He soon fails in his duty, unable to save the majority of camper's lives during the trip and is shot dead by Angela with Riff's Beretta in an attempt to kill her once and for all.
• Haynes Brooke as Bobby Stark. A rather outstanding yet dense and seemingly narrowminded overachiever from Western Springs, Illinois. Somewhat awkward in behavior, he appears to be a blindly jingoist and uninsightful, as well as bland, politics motivated teenager. He dies after Angela tricks him, ties him up to a tree and then tears off his arms by attaching them to her jeep.
• Kyle Holman as Snowboy. A spastic punk teen from Chicago, with a habit of defacing property through tasteless graffiti, which he ardently calls "art". He soon befriends Peter, as the two find their hyper active (and rather destructive) personalities complimenting each other. He is immolated alive with the corpses of Herman's group after being witness to Peter's death and knocked out with a branch.

• Kashina Kessler as Maria Nacastro. A girl from New York City and a rather unstable and uncaring troubled home. A rebellious rocker girl, she is immediately chased into an alley and hit with a semi truck, before Angela steals her identity and loads her corpse in a trash compactor.
• Randi Layne as Tawny Richards. The local charismatic reporter for the WXIA channel news team. Like her live persona, it is a facade, as she reveals to be a stressed, pressured and uncompassionate prettied up woman forced to deal with certain stories she finds abhorrent and undignified, as well as attempt to meet quota for her job. Also a cocaine addict, this eventually becomes her undoing as Angela gives her finely crushed scouring powder that gorily eats away at her throat and brain.
• Chung Yen Tsay as Greg Nakashima. A narcissistic and cocky well-to-do Japanese teenager from Westwood, California.
• Jarret Beal as Peter Doyle. A peppy African American teen from Houston Heights, Texas. He is apparently childlike and immature, always playing pranks on others and is an apparent pyromaniac, enjoying lighting M-80s and setting them off on unsuspecting victims. He is killed in his sleep as Angela detonates an M-80 in his mouth that blows his face off.
• Sonya Maddox as Anita Bircham
• Jill Terashita as Arab. A gossipy Japanese biker girl from San Francisco. Raunchy and foulmouthed, as well as somewhat crude with an attitude, she is decapitated by Angela after ridding her own assigned group.
• Stacie Lambert as Jan Hernandez. An apparent beauty queen and chic teenage Mexican American girl from Palmview, Arizona. She is also rather promiscuous, using sex as a means of recreation and seduction. After witnessing Herman's death by Angela, she also has her temple crushed after failing to escape from her killer.

Production

Like the first sequel, the third film was shot at a YMCA youth camp in Waco, Georgia. Several sequences of violence had to be trimmed in order for the MPAA to give the film an R rating. Anchor Bay Entertainment included some of this deleted footage on its 2002 DVD release.

Valerie Hartman, who portrayed the character of Ally in the previous film, is credited in the sequel as an assistant to the director and as a "raccoon wrangler".^[1]

Releases

Sleepaway Camp III was released on VHS in the United States by Nelson Entertainment on December 15, 1989.^[2]

The film has been released twice on DVD in the United States by Anchor Bay Entertainment. The first release was in 2002 with a single DVD edition,^[3] as well as in the Sleepaway Camp Survival Kit.^[4] Both these releases are currently out of print.

Anchor Bay Entertainment also released the title on DVD in the United Kingdom on 31 May 2004.^[5]

Scream Factory, under license from MGM, released the film for the first time on Blu-ray on June 9, 2015, along with Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers.^[6]

Critical reception

Allmovie gave it a negative review, writing "Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland is cheaper, dumber, and more profoundly pointless, light years away from the imagination of the first film and an insult to Sleepaway Camp fans."^[7]

References

External links

• Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland at the Internet Movie Database
• Official Sleepaway Camp Site