As far as Friday the 13th rip-offs go, this one is not that bad. Apparently, summer camp was the deadliest setting for carnage in the 1980s. This movie has a villain named Cropsy, a camp caretaker who was horribly disfigured from a fire accidentally started by a prank gone wrong. Those pesky campers!

Flash forward five years and a new round of snot-nosed campers and horny counselors have arrived to enjoy a super great summer, except Cropsy and his sharp hedge trimmers may have something else in mind. You guessed it: dismemberment.

The plot is slow to get going until a group of campers go on a canoeing expedition, which creates the isolation Cropsy needs to strike. And strike he does. The filmmakers did this wonderful “Cropsy camera view” whenever he was stalking his prey, where the camera was smeared with petroleum jelly on the outer edges to imitate a burn victim’s eye sight.

The first notable cast member was Jason Alexander with as much hair on his head as on his back! Keep your shirt on, Jason. Fisher Stevens also shows up as a nerdy counselor and Holly Hunter was in there somewhere for all of 64 seconds. I didn’t see her, but I saw her name in the credits. Nice hiding job, Holly.

The movie wasn’t amazing by any means, but a lot of the shortcomings can be overlooked by the fact that it was competently executed and entertaining enough.

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