Tag: Alice Sweet Alice

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

SLEEPAWAY CAMP

SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983) Two stars

This is one of those instances where I can remember seeing the poster long before the attached movie.

Undoubtedly like most of the jaded youth of my generation, I first saw the poster for SLEEPAWAY CAMP back in the late 1980s. It’s the one that stayed with me the most over the decades.

It has the dominant image of a dripping wet shoe being stabbed all the way through by a bloodied knife. Above, there’s a letter from a camper, “Dear Mom and Dad, I’ve been at Sleepaway Camp for almost three weeks now and I’m getting very scared. …” Right below the hand holding the knife are the title dripping blood from its bold type and the tag “You won’t be coming home!”

Now, hours after watching SLEEPAWAY CAMP for the first time, it’s just as unforgettable as the poster.

To a great degree, SLEEPAWAY CAMP chucks our traditional notions of what constitutes a “good” or a “bad” movie right out the fucking window. It’s more of an experience, an event, a rite of passage, something where you can ask friends and family if they have ever seen it. If they have or haven’t, dynamite conversation will follow either way. For sure, though, it would make a great watch party — of course, following proper social distancing protocol at this point in history.

Here’s a few notes on the experience:

— Melodrama is defined as such, “A sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions.” Addendum: See SLEEPAWAY CAMP. Early on, after the obligatory flashback to traumatic events of the past, Desiree Gould’s Aunt Martha establishes the basic tone for the rest of the movie: Campy with overacting possible. Yes, SLEEPAWAY CAMP goes over-the-top, gleefully, merrily, in every scene, including the end credits.

— Being bat shit crazy for 84 minutes has been SLEEPAWAY CAMP’s meal ticket to cult movie immortality. Because, let’s face it, it’s not as well-made technically as similar low-budget precursors BLACK CHRISTMAS, ALICE SWEET ALICE, and HALLOWEEN. Not even remotely close.

— SLEEPAWAY CAMP uses a musical score that also functions as bludgeoning device and melodrama amplifier. I just checked for any injuries after being whacked upside the head at regular intervals by Edward Bilous’ sledgehammer score. I survived without a single bump — amazing, I know. Anyway, I looked up this Bilous fellow. IMDb linked me to edwardbilous.com and a Bilous quote from the Wall Street Journal, “Artists today need a new set of skills to be able to tell the unique story of their generation.” He’s the founding director for the Center for Innovation in the Arts and the artistic director for Beyond the Machine, A Festival of Electro-Acoustic and Interdisciplinary Art at Juilliard. He joined the Juilliard faculty in 1984.

— “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Nature Trail to Hell” sounds like a spin on FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III and SLEEPAWAY CAMP. “Coming this Christmas to a theater near you / The most horrifying film to hit the screen / There’s a homicidal maniac who finds a cub scout troop / And he hacks up two or three in every scene / Please don’t reveal the secret ending to your friends / Don’t spoil the big surprise / You won’t believe your eyes when you see. …” and “See severed heads that almost fall right in your lap / See that bloody hatchet coming right at you / No, you’ll never see hideous effects like these again / ‘Till we bring you ‘Nature Trail to Hell Part 2.’” File “Nature Trail to Hell” alongside such “Weird Al” epics as “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota,” “Albuquerque,” “Trapped in the Drive-Thru,” and “Jackson Park Express.”

— In his final performance, veteran actor Mike Kellin (1922-83) surpasses Gould in scenery chewing. He chews scenery to such a degree that he could chew through every picture’s scenery within an entire multiplex. Kellin plays Camp Arawak owner Mel Kostic, who keeps downplaying everything until about the 50th dead body. At least it feels that way anyway. He’s one of those characters who becomes creepier and more detestable over the course of the movie, especially when he lines up dinner with a camp counselor in her late teens and assaults one of the main characters who he mistakenly believes to be the killer. Mel loses his shit late in the picture, and it’s not pretty.

— By this point in the review, I should have already discussed the plot. Eight years after a tragic boating accident near Camp Arawak, Aunt Martha sends her niece Angela (Felissa Rose) to camp with Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten), Angela’s cousin and Martha’s son who’s a veteran camper. Mean girls Judy (Karen Fields) and Meg (Katherine Kamhi), as well as a group of their male counterparts both teenage and prepubescent, are relentlessly cruel and nasty toward Angela and Ricky, especially the initially painfully shy and quiet Angela. Ricky’s friend Paul (Christopher Collet) takes a shining to Angela and he’s able to break her silence. Over time, however, the picture develops a dread pattern: Every character who’s cruel and nasty to Angela or Ricky bites the dust in spectacular fashion. Yes, just like everything else in the picture, including the crop-tops and short-shorts, the murder set pieces are over-the-top.

— At this relative late point in the slasher film craze, a mere five years since HALLOWEEN, films in the genre needed a major selling point and SLEEPAWAY CAMP includes one of those (awesome but infuriating) endings that redefines the reality of every scene that came before, just like FRIDAY THE 13TH and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME. This beyond bizarre ending is the first and foremost reason we still talk about SLEEPAWAY CAMP all these years later.

Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)

ALICE, SWEET ALICE (1976) ***

They really tried hard with ALICE, SWEET ALICE, the horror film that’s best known for being Brooke Shields’ film debut.

It appeared in November 1976 at the Chicago International Film Festival, where it competed against such films as ALLEGRO NON TROPPO, GREY GARDENS, SMALL CHANGE, THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND, and Best Feature winner KINGS OF THE ROAD.

It received theatrical release (and mostly negative reviews) in 1977, 1978, and 1981. Viewers might have seen it as either ALICE, SWEET ALICE or COMMUNION (the original title) or HOLY TERROR depending on when they watched it.

The promotional forces especially played on the Brooke Shields angle in ‘78 and ‘81.

One of the ‘78 ALICE, SWEET ALICE ads proclaimed at its top, “PRETTY BABY Brooke Shields, America’s New Star,” a reference to Shields being in Louis Malle’s contemporaneous PRETTY BABY.

Three years later, the film returned as HOLY TERROR with a hard sell promotional campaign again built around exploiting Shields’ notoriety from her Calvin Klein advertisements and her film projects like THE BLUE LAGOON. Shields put up a fight, though, because she had more clout and ENDLESS SUMMER coming down the pike; “Brooke was concerned that film goers could only be disappointed if led into the theater with the promise that the film was of recent vintage or that she had a central part in it,” said her attorney. See, the original HOLY TERROR ads used a photo of Shields circa ‘81 rather than one of her from the film that was made during a different administration. Those naughty ad men, they did a bad, bad thing.

Roger Ebert made the advertising campaign for HOLY TERROR his “Dog of the Week.” “The ads promise that it stars Brooke Shields,” Ebert said. “That’s where the trouble begins, because HOLY TERROR was first released five years ago under the title of COMMUNION and then it was released three years ago as ALICE, SWEET ALICE. Now, when this movie was originally shot, Brooke Shields was a little girl, only 10 years old, and as Calvin Klein can tell you, she’s not 10 years old anymore. Shields has a supporting role in the movie as an apparently demented little girl and it’s an effective thriller alright, but how many title changes is it going to go through in an attempt to cash in on Brooke Shields’ recent popularity?” Gene Siskel replied, “Maybe they ought to try GONE WITH THE WIND.”

Truth in advertising: Shields, listed 10th in the cast in the end credits, appears in the picture for about the first 10 minutes. For those of us who think she’s one of the worst mainstream actresses ever committed to celluloid, that’s a major blessing in disguise. She’s not a demented little girl, though, but the first murder victim. Attending her first communion, her character Karen gets killed real good before she can receive it, strangled to death and then incinerated by a masked figure in a costume that should make one think back to the superior thriller DON’T LOOK NOW. Only this raincoat is yellow rather than red like DON’T LOOK NOW.

Deceptive promotional campaigns are not anything new. They’ve happened before and they will happen again. It happens all the time, and not only (but especially) during election years.

For example, John Travolta made his debut (briefly) in the ridiculous 1975 thriller THE DEVIL’S RAIN, which features Ernest Borghine, Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino, Tom Skerritt, William Shatner, and Keenan Wynn in the cast, as well as the special participation of Anton LaVey, high priest of the Church of Satan. Anyway, in the original 1975 ads, not a mention of Travolta. Instead, we have mug shots of “Satan on Earth” (Borghine), “Devil Destroyer” (Albert), “Demon Sacrifice” (Lupino), “Tortured Soul” (Shatner), and “Faceless Follower” (Wynn) right above the claim “Absolutely the most incredible ending of any motion picture ever!”

Preying on Travolta’s success in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and GREASE, THE DEVIL’S RAIN made a comeback. Siskel named it a “Dog of the Week” the same week in 1978 his colleague Ebert picked that awful monster movie SLITHIS. “My dog this week is a four-year old film named THE DEVIL’S RAIN that’s suddenly come back to a lot of theaters advertised as starring John Travolta,” Siskel said. “Well, that’s a complete lie. THE DEVIL’S RAIN stars Ernest Borghine as a Devil’s helper trying to hang on to some lost souls. Travolta is on screen for less than a minute, this was his first film. He had only one line of dialogue in it. Most of the time, he has red and green wax melting all over his face. Looks like he fell asleep on a pizza. … Beware of films you’ve never heard of promising big stars. One reason you’ve never heard of them, they’re lousy.”

These promotional campaigns definitely backfired in the case of ALICE, SWEET ALICE, because it’s a good little thriller often compared with the works of Alfred Hitchcock and called a prototype of the slasher film. That should have been more than enough to sell the film.

ALICE, SWEET ALICE involves a series of murders in 1961 in Paterson, New Jersey, around a church and an apartment building. Our title character, a 12-year-old girl played by a 18- or 19-year-old Paula Sheppard, becomes the first suspect and she’s sent to a psychiatric institution for evaluation. She was always mean to her little sister and besides, she’s just plain “weird.” Their parents are divorced and they live with their mother Catherine (Linda Miller) and attend St. Michael’s Parish Girls’ School. We also have the girls’ father Dom (Niles McMaster) and their aunt (Jane Lowry), Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich), his housekeeper Mrs. Tredoni (Mildred Clinton), the creepy obese landlord (Alphonso DeNoble), and assorted policemen and minor characters. Dom leaves behind his new wife to more or less become a detective on behalf of his oldest daughter, and that leads to his demise in a scene that echoes Donald Sutherland’s death at the end of DON’T LOOK NOW.

ALICE, SWEET ALICE reminds one of not only DON’T LOOK NOW, but also any number of giallos or Italian thrillers because of the anti-Catholic themes, dark humor, and familial dysfunction. Lucio Fulci’s DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING and Dario Argento’s PROFONDO ROSSO quickly come to mind. Of course, all these films have their roots in Hitchcock.

Director, producer, and co-writer Alfred Sole, who shared the screenplay with Rosemary Ritvo, reveals the real killer around the two-thirds mark and that’s a departure from the modus operandi of the thriller.

ALICE, SWEET ALICE stands up long after the promotional campaign has become a faded memory. Anyway, I’ll still call it Brooke Shields’ best movie.