Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland also known as Nightmare Vacation III is a 1989 American slasher film and the second sequel to Sleepaway Camp (1983) 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.
Video Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland
Plot
In 1989, one year after the events of second film, the film opens with Maria (Kashina Kessler) heading to camp. Suddenly, 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 and poses as Maria in order to board the bus to Camp New Horizons, 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 asks Angela to get her some cocaine, however Angela gives her Ajax cleaner 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 other 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 she returned to the main camp. In another game, Angela is tied to obnoxious Young Republican 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 proceeds to rip his arms off by attaching the rope to a Jeep and driving away. 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. After a tense stand-off 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. Instead, Angela shows them the body of Barney and forces them to find Marcia in one of the cabins. But Angela had set up a booby trap in one of the cabins and it kills Greg and Anita. Angela decides to let Marcia and Tony live, as they had struck up a romance. But as she leaves, Angela is attacked by Marcia who stabs her numerous times, leaving her for dead in the grass.
Marcia and Tony summon the police to camp, and Tony is sad to discover Marcia already has a boyfriend. Meanwhile Angela, barely alive, is being taken to the hospital in an ambulance, where a cop and paramedic plot to kill her after discovering who she is. 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.
Maps Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland
Cast
- Pamela Springsteen as Angela Baker. The lead character and antagonist of the Sleepaway Camp series. She was originally a boy, Peter Baker, who was then forced into becoming his aunt's "daughter." Since the first movie she has killed many teens and others who get in her way. Her preferred haunting is the campgrounds of Camp Arawak, which has seen many renamings and murders. She is motivated to kill out of annoyance or from learning that a person is of an unsavory background and character.
- Tracy Griffith as Marcia Holland. A cheerful young teen from Defiance, Ohio. An easy going band girl and rather innocent than 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 implying that she was only interested in sleeping with him.
- 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. He is a reformed gang member who is desperately seeking a way out of his situation, and is using the retreat to go underground and reevaluate his life.
- Kim Wall as Cindy Hammersmith. A bubbly and somewhat perky Southern Belle teen from Dunwoody, Georgia. A cheerleader who comes from a wealthy family, she has a double side to her upper class life, enjoying the vices of materialistic sex and drug use. Despite her kindly air she is a petty, snotty, chauvinistic and spoiled girl, on top of being raised in a family of racist bigots.
- Daryl Wilcher as Riff. His real name is not mentioned, he is an urban raised African American teenager from Detroit. An antisocial, violent, and delinquent youth, more than likely in a gang due to the weapons he brings into the camp, a knife and a firearm, which Angela later acquires. Seems to have no level of patience for any of the campers, getting in fights easily with other campers and calls Tony by a racial slur. Killed as Angela distracts him with a dissing rap tape she made, before she pins him down with tent stakes, first in the hand, then in the head.
- 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 is actually a short sighted, rather apathetic, self-serving and disillusioned woman, who appears to have reopened the camp purely out of profit. She does so under the guise of a moral project to help understand troubled teenagers and lower the barriers between them and the more privileged youths, all while cutting expenses through denying necessities. She 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, 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, 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 work at Camp New Horizons. As his sexual escapade with Jan is 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 helps 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. He is also driven by a murderous vendetta against the serial killer. He fails in this duty, unable to save the majority of the campers during the trip and is shot dead by Angela with Riff's Beretta while trying to kill her once and for all.
- Haynes Brooke as Bobby. A rather outstanding yet dense and seemingly narrowminded overachiever from Western Springs, Illinois. A Young Republican who is somewhat awkward in behavior, he appears to be blindly jingoist and uninsightful as well as a 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 and driving away.
- Kyle Holman as Snowboy. Real name unknown, he is 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 compliment each other. He is burnt alive with the other corpses of Herman's group after witnessing Peter's death and then knocked out with a branch.
- Kashina Kessler as Maria Nacastro. A girl from New York City, she lives in a rather unstable and uncaring troubled home. A rebellious rocker girl, she is immediately chased into an alley and hit with a 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. Her live persona it is a facade, as she is actually a stressed, pressured and uncompassionate woman forced to deal with certain stories she finds abhorrent and undignified, as well as attempt to meet her quota for her job. A cocaine addict, this becomes her undoing as Angela gives her finely crushed Ajax cleaner powder that gorily eats away at her throat and brain, killing her.
- 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 childlike and immature, always playing pranks on others. He is also a pyromaniac who enjoys lighting M-80s and setting them off on unsuspecting victims. He is killed in his sleep when Angela places a firecracker in his nose 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 crude with an attitude, she is decapitated by Angela after getting rid of her own assigned group.
- Stacie Lambert as Jan Hernandez. A beauty queen and chic teenage Mexican American girl from Palmview, Arizona. She is rather promiscuous, using sex as a means of recreation and seduction. After witnessing Herman's death, she has her temple crushed after failing to escape from Angela.
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".
Releases
Sleepaway Camp III was released on VHS in the United States by Nelson Entertainment on December 15, 1989.
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, as well as in the Sleepaway Camp Survival Kit. 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.
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.
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."
References
External links
- Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland on IMDb
- Official Sleepaway Camp Site
Source of article : Wikipedia
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