Dumpster Raccoon: SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983) – With Album Debut Performance by VIVICA (aka Vivek Shraya!)

Dumpster Raccoon Cinema rings in Pride week with one of the trashiest, most ~problematic~ filmic disasterpieces ever made – one of our most requested films at last released from containment at the bottom of the lake, the once-reviled, now queerly reclaimed SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983)! With VERY SPECIAL LIVE PERFORMANCE from horny, chaotic, shapeshifting nepo baby VIVICA!

Summer camp is turning out to be a disaster for Angela – life at home isn’t any better (her brother and dad got perfunctorily killed in a bizarre motorboat accident, leaving her to be raised by her deeply weird aunt), but at Camp Arawak the kids are mean (except for her chipper and kind cousin Ricky), the girls are bullying her outrageously, and the monstrous counselors are even worse. But things take a turn (for the better?) as one by one all her tormentors suffer outlandishly grisly deaths…who is Angela’s angel of death? And can they be found in time for her date with her crush Paul???

Unbelievably derivative and exploitative of the burgeoning eighties teen slasher genre, with grotesquely baroque murders (albeit visited largely upon the extremely deserving) and a “shocking twist” ending that left audiences stunned and disturbed, there is nevertheless something undeniably queer about SLEEPAWAY CAMP. Filled to the brim with hyper-camp dialogue (Desiree Gould, as Aunt Martha, found her lines so wacky she wanted to walk off set) and ludicrously dressed male leads in the shortest shorts to grace the screen (by costume designer Eileen Sieff Stroup, of WHITE LOTUS fame), the film is permeated with closet-cases, ramped-up teen divas, and the weirdest (SPOILER) forced-femme plot imaginable, leading to its dismissal as exploitation schlock and lurid transphobic trash.

Except that in the years (and many, many sequels!) since, Angela and SLEEPAWAY CAMP have suffered a sea change into something rich and strange – and a surprising reclamation by queer and trans audiences, many of whom see in its themes and hero a spectacular, bumpy, and weird struggle against the impossibilities of the closet, and a lurid revenge fantasy visited against queerphobic cruelty and casual misogynies – that is also undeniably one of the worst, most howlingly ineptly-made movies to grace the Dumpster Raccoon screen!

This is a chance to see this classique, problematique ugly stepchild of the lavender canon as it is best seen – with an audience of rowdy fellow queers, rooting for Angela as much as you are!

With pre-show performance by VIVICA:  alter-ego project of celebrated artist Vivek Shraya! She will also join us for an onstage post-film discussion as we think about the film’s queer themes, afterlives, and place in pop culture history. (ANTHONY OLIVEIRA) 

With queer video preshow, cocktails by the Shameful Tiki Room, and sponsored by Bay Street Video! 

Part of the Dumpster Raccoon series!

Cast/Crew Info
Director: Robert Hiltzik | Cast: Felissa Rose, Jonathan Tiersten, Karen Fields, Christopher Collet, Mike Kellin