Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor

"Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor" was the dreamchild of 1992 that sadly never came true. The film was originally intended to be the fourth installment "Sleepaway Camp" series. It was partially filmed in October 1992 but was never completed due to lack of funding. In 2002 the unfinished footage from the first day of shooting was released and made available as an exclusive fourth disc with the Best Buy edition of the Region 1 "Sleepaway Camp" box set.

But...all was not lost! John Klyza, webmaster of SleepawayCampFilms, helped put together an official final cut of the film which they said would bring closure to the Survivor's legacy. The final film would be 70% material from the first three films and 30% new Survivor material. Is the final film one to be cherished into the hearts of Sleepaway Camp fans everywhere or does it deserve to stay as archived material?

Well, the answer my fellow slasher fans is one that you do not want to hear. "Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor" is not good. Everything about it is terrible in every way that you could only imagine and in several ways that you would have thought they wouldn't have been able to screw up. What's wrong with it? In honor of this terrible movie I will be taking my comments and editing them into a half hearted review. Here we go!

* The flashback clips are the worst quality clips they could find. I'm talking VHS copy of a copy bad. It is grainy, distorted, and hard to make out.

* The sound quality is not good. The "new" footage is far too loud and you can't even hear the old footage. Prepare to have the remote handy for adjusting the volume...every few seconds!

* The new material doesn't make any sense whatsoever and doesn't flow with the editing of the first three films. A random "added" line of dialogue here and there doesn't help matters at all. If anything it just becomes more distracting.

* The old footage (especially from the original film) is so grainy it's hard to know what's going on. I know I already commented on this but after a good Anchor Bay release of the original series, this is inexcusable.

* The tacked on ending is not only super cheesy but it's hard to tell what is even supposed to be happening. All of a sudden our "main girl" is with some burned guy. I don't know what the heck happened.

* The editing of the old clips either start too late or end too early cutting off gags that make the scene work. The pacing is key in order to make a good death and they couldn't even edit them from the first one in a consistent way.

* The deaths are cut in a way that we never actually see what is supposed to be the gruesome aftermath. Once again, bad editing and there is no excuse for this when the material has already been used.

* The voice-over is so bad in the new footage that it doesn't even match what is happening on screen. This only gets worse as the movie progresses.

In short, this movie is only worth owning if you can find it super cheap (hopefully free). Anything over $5 is too much. I really do appreciate the effort but I will never watch this again. If you own the bonus disc, you own ALL of the new material. 30% new material? What a lie. There is barely 10 minutes worth of material here that wasn't originally shown in the first three films. Is it unfair for me to judge this as a final film when it clearly isn't one? Of course not. Nonetheless, is it fair to expect horror fans to pay for material they already own? Absolutely not.

Here in the UK this 4th disc isn't available as it was in the US as part of a Best Buy exclusive offer with the boxset. Being a bit of a completist a friend of mine in the US kindly sent over his copy, insisting the whole time that it was really quite poor, and still I was excited about getting a glimpse of this incomplete sequel.

I think the first thing that has to be said is though the running length is 30 minutes, you are perhaps only getting 4 or 5 different scenes (totalling maybe 7 minutes if that), but with numerous takes. Some are mundane shots like a person running through the same patch of woods, or screaming, over and over again. So don't be deceived into believing what you will have is 30 minutes of storyline or character development which ends abruptly. Nope- there's so little here that even the trailer struggles to be coherent...and fails.

It is harsh to judge based on just a few minutes of footage but it doesn't FEEL like a Sleepaway Camp movie. It lacks the atmosphere of the first film, the humour of parts 2 and 3, and with only 3 characters on film there's no hint of a camp, so even the setting feels wrong, and far more isolated. It sadly reminded me of those cheap TV soft core films (you know the kind- Red Shoe Diaries type of thing) but set in the woods. I don't know if the film intended to go down the skin flick route but that's the impression you get.

So my advice- if you get this as a freebie, fine, view away and sigh in relief that this film was never completed. If you are a completist (and I know it's hard to be talked out of buying things!) please don't spend too much money tracking this one down.

If you bought the Sleepaway Camp DVD Boxset from Best Buy then you probably have the exclusive Bonus 4th DVD which contains the unfinished footage for Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor.

Sleepaway Camp IV is not a movie, in fact the production was shut down after only a few days. Very little film footage was actually shot, and the footage which was shot is more like rehearsal footage. It's interesting to watch once, but it's not something you'd really want to watch over and over again...

Sleepaway Camp IV (2012)

BOMB (out of 4)

After the success of SLEEPAWAY CAMP 2 and 3, plans for a fourth film were made and eventually filming began. Shortly after that the company behind the picture went bankrupt so the film production stopped. Years later Anchor Bay released a boxset of the three films and as an added bonus they included production footage and outtakes from the fourth film. Then, in 2008, the long awaited RETURN TO SLEEPAWAY CAMP was released but then word got out about a "new" film.

That "new" film turned out to be SLEEPAWAY CAMP IV: THE SURVIVOR, which in the end is nothing but a cheap way to milk money out of fans. This film runs 70 minutes and about ten minutes worth of that is footage from the unreleased part four. The other sixty minutes are scenes from the first three movies. To be more clear, all the death scenes and "highlights" from the first three movies are played here.

There are so many problems with this film but the biggest is the fact that there simply wasn't enough footage to make a fourth film. You get movies like SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 2 where a little footage is shown and then footage from the original is thrown in to make it a feature. That doesn't happen here because there just wasn't enough original footage. Even worse is the fact that the footage from the first three films is of horrible quality and the editing is just awful. The "story" they try to tell with all the footage is just embarrassing.

There's really no point in watching this film when the first three movies are available in wonderful special editions and the fourth film's outtakes can be viewed in many places.

LOL ... Has anyone ever seen the trailer for this film? I have never laughed so hard in my life...I think both my lungs popped. It looks like a film crew went out in the woods with three actors and shot a bunch of footage and then edited it together. Its almost like one of those trailers that was put together to present at a studio as a "visual aid" for a possible idea for a movie. And the guys echoed voice was priceless.