Nerds That Geek Movie Review – ‘Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland’

Written by John Edward Betancourt

​At some point or another in our cinematic adventures, we’ve all heard the phrase ‘franchise fatigue’ get thrown around when a particular series of films or concept at the box office begins to falter both financially and in popularity and that phrase exists for one particular reason, there’s some serious merit behind it. Eventually, the ideas that once captivated audiences simply no longer resonate with them for various reasons and people simply stop going to see them. 
 
But I’ve come to learn that sometimes, there’s another important element that comes into play when it comes to franchise fatigue in that, the quality of the films helps to determine the fate of a franchise as well. After all, when a particular saga churns one great movie after another, people will gladly hand over their money to see what new adventures await them and when they don’t… well we know how that story ends, and sadly all of these negative elements came into play in 1989, when the Sleepaway Camp saga reached its lowest point with the release of the supremely rough, Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland.
 
Now in this particular tale, set roughly a year after Angela ‘The Angel of Death’ Baker violently murdered everyone at Camp Rolling Hills, we find ourselves returning to Angela’s former hunting grounds for all the right reasons. Because a kind and caring couple have decided to re-open the place under the name Camp New Horizons, wherein teens from all walks of life can come together and see that people are all the same. But there’s just one problem, Angela has killed one of the campers and taken their place at camp, and it won’t be long before she turns this social experiment into a waking nightmare as she works to satisfy her endless bloodlust. 

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​Filmed back to back with Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers, this movie does deserve some serious credit for getting right down to the gore since we get our first kill just a few minutes in and it is a creative one since I’ve never seen a garbage truck be used as a weapon before and honestly, that opening splatter is promising to say the least, but alas, it’s all downhill from there and that’s quite frankly a crying shame because this particular entry in the Baker saga had some serious potential to be something special.
 
Take the interesting premise of the camp’s purpose for instance, since the notion of brotherhood and unity is something you don’t often see in horror films and had the film explored this and used it to perhaps surprise Angela and give her a better outlook on humanity, who knows what kind of story we would have ended up with. Instead, we are treated to ugly and foul human beings (outside of the protagonist), that you simply don’t care about when they die and honestly, their reviling nature helps you to lose interest in the story and in the end they’re really nothing more than fodder for Angela.
 
Yet even then the kills are pretty pedestrian to the say the least, and if anything, this film just feels tired. It offers nothing new, just the same old stuff we’ve seen before, complete with the racial stereotypes that were prevalent in horror during the 1980s and this motion picture shut down the franchise for many, many years, and the poor reception it received is well deserved since the same team that brought us the plucky part II, simply phoned this one in. So, see this one simply out of respect for the saga, just don’t expect anything special once you hit play.  

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