Our favorite transphobic slasher is back with a follow-up to the original shocker, and as suspected, “Unhappy Campers” fails to live up to the gasps that followed the original film’s surprise ending. There really are no other surprises we can derive from this premise anymore, so “Unhappy Campers” is a slasher comedy with such flimsy production quality, it’s actually very charming. How can you not enjoy Angela’s gallery of maimed corpses, most of whom can be seen breathing or struggling to keep still on close up shots? It’s a gas.
Now in camp Rolling Hills, Angela has become the head counselor for a group of forgettable and fairly annoying new campers. They’re all normal kids for the most part. They have romances, and sex, and pranks, but Angela isn’t having it. Angela is a very chaste counselor hell bent on ensuring the campers don’t fall out of line with the camp rules, and her own personal moral code. Not that it stops everyone from doing what they please, it’s just Angela has really vicious means of punishing disobedient campers. And they don’t survive most of her punishments.
What I love about this movie is that it’s so absurd and ridiculous I didn’t even bother picking out the plot holes. Why would the head of the camp allow Angela to bring the campers home herself? Why does this camp have only two counselors? This is a summer camp losing kids without notice, and they never seem really disturbed by these sudden disappearances. At all. Beyond the bad acting, most of the moments in the movie are absolutely inexplicable, and downright laughable. There’s a particularly confusing sex scene in a bathroom stall, and the final scene is one laugh out loud twist too many.
Pamela Springsteen picks up with Felissa Rose left off, and does an admirable job as a deluded psychopath, despite her murderous habits being utterly ambiguous most times. We knew why she murdered the people in the original film, but here it just seems like murders for the sake of murdering. And didn’t the head of camp compose background checks before hiring the counselors? The sub-plots involving the campers are often pointless padding that poses little impact on the overall film. All of the campers in this seemingly small and isolated summer camp are just cannon fodder for Angela, and she revels in doling out vicious murders.
There’s death by chainsaw, power drill, and battery acid, and a very creative murder with the use of an outhouse toilet. “Unhappy Campers” is a silly, and ridiculous slasher, but a hell of a lot of fun. Angela is that unique slasher villain you can laugh at, while she destroys petulant children and sex starved teenagers.