80s Movies About Summer Camp

Ten reasons your parents should have just let you stay home.

Entries
10
Category
Film
Updated
  1. A camp flagpole with a homemade banner raised, an overturned director's chair and scattered bunk keys in the dirt below.

    10. Summer Camp Nightmare

    Bert L. Dragin · 1987

    Lord of the Flies with bunk beds. A charismatic counselor-in-training leads a coup against Chuck Connors's strict director, and the revolution goes the way revolutions go. Based on the novel The Butterfly Revolution. Still not officially on DVD, apparently by popular demand.

  2. A camp counselor's whistle and clipboard of demerits on a stump beside a lit campfire and a marshmallow stick.

    09. Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers

    Michael A. Simpson · 1988

    Angela is back, now a counselor, and Bruce Springsteen's sister Pamela plays her because Felissa Rose was at NYU. The directors decided slashers were exhausted and made a comedy instead. They shot it back-to-back with Part III to keep budgets under $1 million each.

  3. A camp nurse's first aid kit open on a cot, spilling bottles of calamine lotion and a single wilted wildflower.

    08. Poison Ivy

    Larry Elikann · 1985

    An NBC movie with Michael J. Fox as a counselor at Camp Pinewood, Maine, chasing the nurse, played by Nancy McKeon. It aired in February, months before Back to the Future. The New York Times called it two hours of tedium. It's 97 minutes. Felt like two hours.

  4. A janitor's mop and bucket beside a camp flagpole, a mining bulldozer parked ominously at the edge of the woods.

    07. Ernest Goes to Camp

    John R. Cherry III · 1987

    Ernest, the maintenance man at Kamp Kikakee, becomes counselor to a cabin of juvenile delinquents and defends the land from a mining company. Lyle Alzado plays the foreman. It cost $3.5 million and made $23.5 million. Know what I mean.

  5. Two cabin chalkboards side by side with tally marks, a sleeping bag and a transistor radio on the floor between them.

    06. Little Darlings

    Ronald F. Maxwell · 1980

    Tatum O'Neal and Kristy McNichol play rival campers in a bet that splits the cabin into teams. Matt Dillon is the boy across the lake. It made $34 million, then music licensing kept it off home video for years. Ebert said it treated its subject with dignity. Somehow true.

  6. A pair of rusty garden shears stuck upright in the bow of an empty wooden raft drifting on a still lake.

    05. The Burning

    Tony Maylam · 1981

    Miramax's first production, about a burned caretaker named Cropsy with garden shears. Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter and Fisher Stevens all make their film debuts. Tom Savini did the effects. The raft scene is why nobody from 1981 canoes.

  7. A small space shuttle model on a launch pad made of camp bunk beds, a toy robot standing guard beside it.

    04. SpaceCamp

    Harry Winer · 1986

    Teens at the real Space Camp in Huntsville get accidentally launched into orbit by a robot named Jinx. It came out five months after the Challenger disaster and flopped hard. Joaquin Phoenix debuts as Leaf. The worst camp outcome on this list that nobody dies in.

  8. A lightning bolt striking an iron fence post in a rainy cemetery, a camp sign repainted with fresh green paint in the background.

    03. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

    Tom McLoughlin · 1986

    The first in the series with actual children at the camp, now renamed Camp Forest Green to escape its reputation. Jason returns by lightning, Alice Cooper does three songs, and the characters discuss horror rules a decade before Scream. Rebranding rarely works.

  9. A sun-faded camp T-shirt hanging on a bunk bed post beside a hunting knife and a curling iron on a cabin floor.

    02. Sleepaway Camp

    Robert Hiltzik · 1983

    Hiltzik filmed at Camp Algonquin, the upstate New York camp he went to as a kid, for about $350,000. Dismissed as a Friday the 13th knockoff, it is now remembered almost entirely for its final shot. Felissa Rose was paid $5,000. Bring a snack.

  10. A row of empty wooden cabins by a misty lake at dawn, a single canoe floating offshore and an axe leaning against a porch rail.

    01. Friday the 13th

    Sean S. Cunningham · 1980

    Shot at a working Boy Scout camp in New Jersey for about $550,000, it made roughly $60 million and taught a generation that counselors have one job. Kevin Bacon gets an arrow through the neck from under a bed. The killer is someone's mom, who had a point.

Honorable mentions

  • A dented bugle, a stack of mismatched cafeteria trays and a hand-drawn Olympiad scoreboard on a lakeside dock.

    Meatballs

    Ivan Reitman · 1979

    Six months too early to qualify and the reason every movie above exists. Bill Murray's first starring role, about $1.5 million to make, around $70 million back. His speech before the Olympiad remains the best argument ever made for losing.

Dishonorable mentions

  • A pair of boxing gloves hanging from a camp cabin hook beside a small glowing green flying saucer on the windowsill.

    Meatballs Part II

    Ken Wiederhorn · 1984

    No Bill Murray, a different camp, and a boxing match to save it. The campers also hide an alien nicknamed Meathead. Paul Reubens and John Larroquette show up. The Times cited pallid writing and tired jokes, which was generous about the alien.

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