On the surface, this looks like the typical (usually boring) slasher film with a campground setting. There are so many out there that it's kind of hard to tell one from the other, but this one really stands out for the people who bother to give it a chance and don't just dismiss it for what it appears to be. Because there was actually a lot of thought put into this story. It's not a clean-cut plot and has a totally creepy underbelly of a story that requires actual thought to decipher the results. This movie also boasts one of the most shocking endings in cinematic history (and I totally agree). Anyway, let's get on with the story. The movie opens with a terrible boating accident in which a father and one of his two kids (a boy and a girl) are killed. Not sure which child yet. Several years later, we discover that the remaining child has gone to live with crazy Aunt Martha and her son Ricky (the orphaned kids' cousin). Apparently, it was the little girl that survived the boating accident, a girl named Angela who is Ricky's cousin and Martha's niece.
Ricky and Angela are off to Camp Arawak for the summer when before leaving the (very eccentric) aunt gives Ricky the papers for their physicals that are required for attendance at camp and remarks that these papers should "take care of everything", Aunt Fruitcake (I mean Aunt Martha) is also a doctor/surgeon (with criminal dress sense).
Anyway, the kids get to camp, Ricky is outgoing but Angela is painfully shy and says maybe 10 full sentences throughout the entire movie. She's a little weird in other ways too. She hates the water (why even go to camp then?), almost never speaks even when violently shaken and has a tendency to blatantly stare at people with the most vacant look imaginable. Being weird, she stands out immediately and is soon picked on. Her cousin Ricky always comes to her aid with a vicious and violent retort towards the people picking on her.
Eventually, all the people that picked on Angela start dropping like flies. For most of the movie, you're not really sure who the killer is, but it's made pretty obvious that it's either Ricky or Angela. Predictably speaking, you'd think it would be Ricky killing people to avenge his disturbed cousin. A twist (a very simple twist though) would be Angela doing the killing because she's a little weirdo. In the end, we learn it was at least one of the two and it's made to look like that person did it alone. I personally don't think so, I think both Ricky and Angela did it together. There is a scene where after Angela is maliciously thrown into the water that she really hates, Ricky rescues her and says "Don't worry, we'll make them pay". There's also a murder in the movie where a kid is drowned under a canoe by the killer. Angela really hates water, so how can this be? And trust me she hates water for a legitimate reason.
Anyway, there is one camper named Paul that actually penetrates Angela's shyness and they sorta become an item. Eventually, he makes the moves on her and she begrudgingly lets him kiss her. While she is in this situation we are shown a memory from Angela's past when she and her brother observe their father (that was killed at the beginning of the movie) in bed with another man. She quickly refuses his advances and runs off. He continues to pursue her even after being caught kissing some snotty bitch named Judy that's been harassing Angela all through the movie. Angela finally tells Paul to meet her by the waterfront (with a crazy freakin' look in her eye) with the assumption of messing around.
In the end, we see a very different Angela as she is approached by a couple of camp counselors. She seems to be naked and is stroking Paul's hair. When she stands and turns around, Paul's head tumbles from her lap and she is seen frontally nude. Surprise, it's a guy! It sounds quite comical, but there's a really deep creepiness about the way Angela looks. All over hairy, a big dangling wang, and the creepiest panting, scream-shaped face you could ever imagine. Totally has to be seen to be believed. Left me with chills for years.
Right before the total reveal of Angela as a guy, we're taken on a flashback to when her father and sibling were killed. Apparently, it was actually the sister that got killed in the boating accident. When the boy goes to live with his nutty aunt Martha (y'know, the surgeon) Aunt Martha decides that since she's always wanted a girl, she's gonna change the surviving boy into a girl. Not sure how far she got though. When nutty Aunt Martha is telling Peter that he's to become a girl named Angela, the poor kid has bandages around his head. When I saw it as a kid, I always assumed that Aunt Martha gave Peter his sister's brain, so he would think like a girl. But the kid was just involved in a boating accident so that's probably the explanation for the bandages, but the child looks several years older than the one involved in the boating accident and it seems that some time has definitely passed.
No matter how it happened, Peter had a gay father, and being a man forced to grow up as a woman he developed serious sexual issues and gender confusion. Hitting puberty and having a boy make sexual advances towards her/him obviously just sent Angela right over the top. Like I said, it seems really contrived at first but has a nice little unexpected twist at the end.
This ending made it look like Angela was the killer all along, but upon further inspection, it's totally obvious that Ricky helped her kill. After all, he also knew about her little secret, and that's gotta twist a kid's mind at least a little.
There are some really odd choices made in this film though. There's a cook who is very obviously a child molester and flaunts it like it's a completely acceptable thing, even referring to the little girls as "baldies" and nobody says anything! His coworkers just laugh it off and never take it seriously. And at one point a police officer shows up with the fakest-looking mustache you could possibly imagine, it's literally a couple of strips of black tape. I mean really? Was a mustache on a cop really that important of a character trait to make such an obvious goof?
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