It amazes me how revisionist we movie fans can be. We love to look back on bad horror films and claim, in retrospect, that they deserve points for intentional camp. Where would Roger Corman's career be without this? Where would the SLEEPWAY CAMP franchise be? I should have known better than to watch this, as I found the original badly made/acted and offensive. But the RETURN TO SLEEPAWAY CAMP box had the look of a better than average sequel. And it had been twenty years since the original, twenty years that the writer/director had to mount an effort superior to his overrated debut.<br /><br />Forget all that. RETURN TO SLEEPAWAY CAMP is as bad as cinema gets. It's amateurishly acted, badly scripted, and features some of the most obnoxious characters its ever been my displeasure to view. Sequences appear to have been randomly assembled. Even the death sequences, the bread and butter of the slasher film, are so badly put together that they're laughable.<br /><br />There's also the basic plot (which is about as basic as you can get). Slasher kills. The problem is that the official red herring is such an obnoxious character that we never care whether he did it or not. I was actually hoping someone would just kill him fast and refund my rental money.<br /><br />I realize that I've been overly critical of some films on this site, but this is not one of them. Contrary to anyone's assessment, the SLEEPAWAY CAMP franchise is not the result of high camp. It's the result of bad film-making.