Eight years after her dad was killed in a freak waterskiing accident, Angela (Felissa Rose) goes to summer camp with her protective cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) in this sleeper slasher from 1983.

One of the more interesting and infamous films from the ’80s slasher cycle, Sleepaway Camp made a cult splash with its notorious ending and twisted gender politics. Pitched somewhere between Friday the 13th and Carrie, the movie’s unresolved tension between transgressive exploitation and anti-bullying messaging leaves it floundering in murky waters.

This film is so confused and craftless that it feels like it could fall apart at any moment. There are not only performances but entire characters who appear to belong in totally different films. The summer camp is inexplicably run by a violent cigar-chomping businessman (Mike Kellin), with a paedophile cook (Owen Hughes) and an apparent gang rivalry between children’s softball teams.

The movie benefits from avoiding the usual masked killer gimmick, and casting actual kids rather than the suspiciously balding “teenagers” who typically populate summer camps in slasher flicks. They should have called it Children of the Corn on the Cob. This gives the adult content a creepy edge, but more surprising and compelling is the psychological tension between the children.

Sleepaway Camp eschews the genre’s scary camp fun in favour of balls-out torment, though it is never clear how deliberate its discomfort is meant to be. This leaves the movie flip-flopping between morbid fascination and unwatchability, more suitable for academic seminars than any sanctioned sleepover.