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"It seems every year I'm at camp someone loses their head."
Angela

Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland is a Black Comedy Slasher Movie released in 1989. Shot back-to-back with its predecessor, it follows Angela infiltrating a group of campers to continue to exact her brand of "niceness".

Another sequel was made... but not without problems.

This film has the examples of:

  • Adults Are Useless: Herman and Lily Miranda, who are the adults in charge of the camp, don't even notice that their campers (and each other) are rapidly disappearing, but this can be partly chalked up to the fact that they'd been split into three teams and separated from one another. Still, the uselessness of the two is a big reason why they die.
    • Averted by Barney Whitmore, a genuinely nice guy who cares for the campers.
  • Affably Evil: Angela's surprisingly kinder in this film and only kills a lot of people who actually deserve to die. Otherwise, she's reluctant to kill people who caused her no harm unless forced to.
  • All Girls Want Bad Boys: Marcia has the hots for bad boy Tony, and is intrigued by the fact that he's in a gang.
  • All Women Are Lustful:
    • Arab actually jokes about sex between the campers and makes fun of how Angela is the only girl to wear a bra.
    • Jan enjoys Herman's proposition for sex despite the fact that he's a Dirty Old Man and she's underage.
  • Alpha Bitch: Cindy is a privileged and spoiled cheerleader who enjoys flaunting her wealth and status to the other campers, especially the minorities.
  • Asshole Victim: Pretty much everyone who dies except Barney, Greg, and Anita. Arab may also be an exception since the only bad thing she did was cuss. Maria may also be exempt due to her never shown doing anything horrible other than fighting with her neglectful parents.
  • Badass Biker: Arab comes across as this due to her black leather, casual swearing, and role as a Fanservice Extra.
  • Big Bad Wannabe: Riff comes across as this. He acts like he's the bad boy of the campground thanks to his gangster persona and even armed with a Beretta handgun, but the problem is while he would be a threat in a non-horror thriller, he would not qualify in a slasher flick and he naturally gets killed by Angela.
  • Broken Bird:
    • Angela comes across as this as she only ever wanted to have a happy summer camp experience, only to have it completely ruined by history repeating itself.
    • Maria may come across as one as well due to her troubled home life causing her great depression, her attempts to attend summer camp to overcome her problems, and the fact that she was so cruelly murdered by Angela because the killer needed to steal her identity.
  • The Bully: Riff, Snowboy, and Peter stupidly pick on Angela all the time.
  • Bullying a Dragon: Everyone who interacts with Angela loves to pick on her. This naturally ends with gruesome results for them.
  • Bus Crash: Molly didn't survive at the end of the second film.
  • Car Fu: Angel drives over Maria with a garbage truck, and then proceeds to hide and crush her body in its compactor.
  • Carry a Big Stick: Angela interrupts Jan and Herman having sex in a tent, and starts beating and stabbing them with a stick. Snowboy gets the same treatment later.
  • Cool Old Guy: Barney Whitmore. While Herman is busy fooling around with a teenage camper and Lily is busy asking the kids to catch their own food (fish) so she can spend more time lazing around, Barney offers the kids hot dogs and bonds with them, mainly because he didn't have much time to do so with his late son, Sean, from the second movie.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: Angela kills Lily by burying her up the neck, lifting a running lawnmower up, and slamming it down on her head.
  • Dead Person Impersonation: Angela steals Maria's identity to infiltrate the New Horizons Camp.
  • Death by Racism: Cindy. She's the most foul-mouthed, racist, xenophobe there ever was and is rewarded with a brutal death.
  • Decoy Protagonist: The opening makes it seem that we'll be following Maria, but then Angela kills her.
    • Barney Whitmore seems to be the Tritagonist of the film, but is killed off near the climax.
  • Dirty Old Man: Herman. He cheats on his wife with an underage teenager.
  • Disney Villain Death: Technically, Cindy dies thanks to Angela utilizing gravity. Cindy gets suspended by a flagpole, then dropped to her death.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: Angela actually thinks Greg and Anita are nice kids. However, she kills them anyway because she finds them "boring".
  • Downer Beginning: Admittedly, the beginning seems rather sad for Maria. She's a troubled teenage girl with a strained relationship with her family and wants to go to summer camp to turn her life around. Sadly, she ends up killed by Angela so the killer can impersonate her.
  • Eye Scream: A cop who's looking over Angela in the ambulance gets a syringe in the eye.
  • Fake Memories: Angela has one from the previous year at Camp Rolling Hills where practically everyone was cheering for Angela when she as awarded Counselor Of The Year considering the actual fact that most of the campers were aloof to her getting the award. It makes sense that Angela would have that kind of memory considering how insane she is.
  • Faux Action Guy: Barney Whitmore is a trained police officer who vows to kill Angela, but suffers a rather anticlimactic death by getting shot dead.
  • Final Girl: Averted with Marcia, who isn't the sole survivor. She isn't as wholesome as she appears either, as she reveals to her supposed Love Interest Tony that she "kinda" has a boyfriend already.
  • Fishing for Sole: Angela manages to fish out a hockey mask from the water. Right afterward it's remarked that the date is Saturday the 14th.
  • Flat Character: Campers Anita and Greg get no character development throughout the film and their only purpose seems to be filler roles. This is also the reason Angela kills them.
  • Gainax Ending: The story closes out with Angela killing two medics before spouting a one liner as she's taken to the hospital.
  • Hate Sink: 90% of the cast is made up of nothing but the worst kind of people in society. In fact, Angela looks like a hero in comparison. Thus, making the Sleepaway Camp universe a Crapsack World.
  • Heroic Wannabe: More than a few characters have actually deluded themselves into believing that they're decent human beings.
    • Bobby is a privileged jock who wants to become a politician someday and tries to cheer up the campers on his team, but he's really just a snobby horndog who wants to bone Angela.
    • Cindy is a rich girl who thinks that she's the popular funny girl making camp fun when she's just a hypocritical, racist Rich Bitch.
    • Camp Councilor Lily thinks that she's the Team Mom who'll inspire her campers to have fun, but she's just a short-sighted, hypocritical lazy slacker who couldn't care less about what her campers do.
  • Horrible Judge of Character: The entire camp assumes that Angela is a Shrinking Violet who's easy to bully because she's too timid to fight back. If only they knew...
  • Hypocrite: Camp councilor Lily is a lazy, useless, egotistical old woman who wants to be the Big Good of the summer camp, but she's nothing more than Fat Bitch.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice:
    • Herman gets stabbed through the mouth with a stick.
    • Greg and Anita get impaled on axes.
  • Jerkass:
    • Gangbanger Riff, pranksters Snowboy and Peter, sarcastic biker girl Arab, sex kitten Jan, privileged jingoistic snob Bobby, racist Cindy.
    • Averted by Greg and Anita, even Angela says that they're nice kids. She still kills them anyway, only because she considers them boring.
    • Also averted by Marcia and Tony, the sole survivors of the massacre.
  • Karmic Death:
    • Peter is killed by his own fireworks that he used to scare Angela earlier. She stuffs one into his nose as he sleeps, and lights the fuse.
    • Lily, who sat on her ass and did nothing all weekend while forcing Angela to take out her own garbage and completely covered up the murders that went on around the camp, ends up buried alive by said serial killer she neglected in her own garbage and horrifically murdered.
  • Kick The Son Of A Bitch: Angela brutally murders all the Jerkass characters who spend their time causing mischief and bullying others.
  • Kill and Replace: Angela murders Maria to steal her identity in order to infiltrate the new summer camp.
  • Kill the Cutie: Poor Broken Bird Maria ends up killed by Angela right at the beginning.
  • N-Word Privileges: Two instances where this is disregarded. One from Riff (a black camper) to Tony (a Latino). Another with Cindy (a white Southern girl) to Riff.
  • Nice Guy: Tony. He's a troubled youth, but he really came to camp to get over his bad life.
  • No Ending: The film simply ends abruptly with Angela sitting in the back of an ambulance alive and well.
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Angela spares Marcia and Tony's lives, only to have Marcia thank her by stabbing her and leaving her to bleed out.
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Angela beats Jan to death.
  • Numbered Sequels: With a subtitle.
  • Off with His Head!:
    • Angela kicks Arab inside a tent, and chops off her head as she tries to crawls out of it.
    • Lily gets her head sliced off by a lawnmower.
  • Older Than They Look: A lot of characters lampshade how Angela (who's impersonating Maria) doesn't look like a teenager.
    Arab: How old are you?
    Angela: Me? I'm 17.
    Arab: Oh. You look older.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: Snowboy. He never gets referred to as anything else
  • Only Sane Man: Barney Whitmore is this amongst the counselors. Greg, Anita, Marcia and Tony are this amongst the teenagers, especially Marcia and Tony, as they managed to survive up to the end of the film.
  • Parental Neglect: Maria is not cherished by her parents at all. Which makes her death all the more tragic.
  • Pet the Dog: Angela decides to let Marcia and Tony live at the end of the film. This comes back to bite her in the ass when Marcia attacks and (possibly) kills her.
  • Police Are Useless: Barney Whitmore is a former cop, but he is swiftly taken out by Angela upon confronting her. Also, a policeman in an ambulance gets stabbed in the eye by Angela.
  • Politically Incorrect Villain: Cindy is a rich, white girl who harshly criticizes all the ethnic characters in the film.
  • Really Gets Around: Jan is very eager to sleep with Dirty Old Man Herman.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: Former policeman Barney Whitmore, as he is the only adult counselor who is committed to his job unlike Lily and Herman and make sure the teenagers have a good time.
  • Sex Signals Death: Herman and one of the female campers he screws around with naturally get killed by Angela.
  • Shipper on Deck: Angela lets Marcia and Tony go because she thinks they look like a nice couple.
  • Shout-Out:
    • The film's subtitle is a reference to a line from The Who's 1971 song "Baba O'Riley." It also gets yelled out by Snowboy in one scene.
    • The privileged campers are named after The Brady Bunch kids, while the less privileged campers are named after characters from West Side Story, including the disguised Angela going incognito "as Maria"
    • Angela manages to fish up a hockey mask from the lake at the summer camp. After that someone remarks that the date is Saturday the 14th.
    • Camp owners Herman and Lily Miranda are named after Herman and Lily Munster of The Munsters.
  • Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror: Admittedly, the film does a decent job at making you laugh and terrifying you with gruesome murder.
  • The Sociopath: Peter and Riff come across as dangerously psychotic. Riff casually threatens to kill others if they piss him off while Peter loves throwing lethal firecrackers at girls for shits and giggles.
  • Straight Edge Evil: Angela does not smoke, drink, or use illegal drugs and if she catches you doing any of those things, look out!
  • Those Two Guys: Anita and Greg are usually seen together.
  • Title Drop: Snowboy chants how the summer camp is a "Teenage wasteland."
  • Too Dumb to Live:
    • In the beginning, Maria is being chased down by a semi-truck attempting to run her over. Instead of running towards a crowd of people on the street to call for help, she chooses to run down a dark alley where nobody can see her, unsurprisingly getting killed.
    • The newscaster buys drugs off of a minor teenage girl she knows absolutely nothing about and drives into the center of an uninhabited forest to get high, naturally dying of poisonous products.
    • The entire camp completely ignores the blood red spray paint across the girl's cabin stating that "Angela is back'' and make absolutely nothing of it until it's too late.
  • Token Minority: Each group of campers has at least one African-American, one Latin American, and one Asian-American. The underprivileged group actually has two African-Americans in Anita and Riff.
  • Unwilling Suspension: Angela does this to Cindy by hoisting her up a flagpole. She then lets go of the rope, causing her to die by falling..
  • You Killed My Father: Turns out Sean from the second movie had a vengeful father (he is not The Hero so he is killed anticlimactically after confronting Angela).
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Like the last film, Angela operates like this since, since most of the people she kills are people she believes to be bad campers and counselors. Then again, most of the other campers are assholes. Also somewhat inverted in the fact that she kills Anita and Greg, two campers she actually considers nice people, because they're "boring".
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Tawny the reporter confirms the Camp Rolling Hills massacre death count at 19, meaning Molly didn't survive the previous movie.
  • Your Head A-Splode: Peter gets his head blown off by one of his own firecrackers.

 
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Angela

Angela tells Cindy Hammersmith that she has to die because Cindy's a cheerleader, uses drugs and has had sex.

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