Memorial Valley Massacre / Memorial Day / Valley of Death / Son of Sleepaway Camp (1988) -**
Subgenres that become the hot new thing follow a recognizable life cycle. They start off fuzzy and ill-defined, as filmmakers experiment with the elements that will later become their distinguishing features. Almost necessarily, movies from this phase are recognizable only in retrospect as belonging to a new category, although some of them might be perceived in the moment as strange, misfit examples of some older, familiar form. Then comes the snap into focus, resulting from some picture or handful thereof attracting lots of attention and making lots of money, so that there’s suddenly a powerful incentive to make more of whatever that was. The market-saturation phase follows, as imitators crawl out of the woodwork, ultimately deadening audience interest through sheer repetition. And finally comes the decadent phase, in which weirder and weirder mutations arise as the latecomers tweak the formula in the hope of standing out from the crowd. Once in a great while, one of those mutants will hit big, and touch off a second glut. And somewhat more often, a really peculiar mutant will give rise to a whole new subgenre, starting the cycle anew.
The slasher movie passed through all of the aforementioned phases over the course of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, the optional ones included. But precisely because it did manage to revitalize itself— twice!— by adjusting the recipe, it underwent an atypical, modified version of the cycle, in which the strains that didn’t adapt lapsed into decadence even as the ones that did were flourishing. In 1988, for example, supernatural slashers were enjoying the waning hours of a triumphant heyday indeed, but the older mundane variety continued limping lamely along in their shadow. The latter type were just too cheap and easy to make to be forsworn altogether, and the home video labels were still willing to release anything in order to fill the rental shop shelves. And make no mistake, original-recipe slashers were getting weird in the late 80’s, even without any help from re-animation, soul transference, or nightmare ghosts. Take Memorial Valley Massacre. This film tries to split the difference between Eegah, The Prey, and Jaws at a summer camp, with maybe a dash of The Emerald Forest to top it off. It posits a crooked developer endangering the opening-season crowd at his new campground in the previously pristine wilderness by failing to notice that the valley was already home to a long-lost child who grew up to be a feral neo-Neanderthal, together with an obsessed ex-military tracker who takes a job at said camp on the theory that the killer cave-teen might be the son he lost to a kidnapper most of two decades ago. It was the slasher genre’s special curse, though, that none of that ends up being nearly as interesting or enjoyable as I’ve just made it sound.
The shady developer is one Allen Sangster (Cameron Mitchell, from The Demon and The Tomb). His company acquired Memorial Valley last year, and although it might seem strange for him to start exploiting it by building a campground, of all things, there’s a halfway-reasonable scheme behind the project. The real estate appeal of Memorial Valley was precisely its status as unspoiled wilderness. Sangster would have tied himself up in environmental impact litigation for years if he’d jumped straight to erecting hotels and shopping malls, but a campground can plausibly be spun as responsible stewardship in comparison. Let the Cub Scouts and Winnebago Warriors have the place to themselves for a couple-three summers, and then start adding “improvements” and “amenities.” But while that might be a clever plan, I’m not convinced it’s a realistic one— not least because Sangster’s specific approach to the camp so manifestly isn’t. The developer has been treating the Saturday before Memorial Day as an iron-bound, drop-dead opening date for the past four months, even as the actual construction fell inexorably further behind schedule. When the big weekend comes, the cabins still aren’t fit for human occupancy, the bathing facilities are nowhere near complete, and the entire site is littered with bulldozers, scaffolding, and other unsightly evidence of work in progress. Even so, Sangster isn’t budging an inch. There’s a line of cars halfway to the county line waiting for Deke the maintenance man (Jimmy Justice) to open the gate, and no fucking way is Sangster going to tell all those customers to turn around and go home.
The disturbing thing, though, is how Memorial Valley Campground got to be so late in coming together. No fewer than three men of the construction crew have died so far! All the attendant circumstances are such that the deaths can be written off as unfortunate accidents, but with that much bad luck floating around, you can hardly blame the laborers for getting spooked. The latest mishap, discovered just minutes before Sangster’s arrival to host the grand opening, is the final straw for the contractors. The dog they had employed to stand guard over the worksite by night has drowned in the well, thoroughly contaminating the camp’s only functioning source of drinking water. And since the watchdog couldn’t have fallen down there without first lifting a concrete slab twice his own weight, the only logical conclusion is that there’s a saboteur on the loose. That throws an altogether harsher light onto the earlier fatal accidents, and the foreman lets it be known that Sangster can take this job and shove it.
If there really is a saboteur, he isn’t the only one whom all concerned would prefer not to have around. Sangster has a 20-something son named David (Mark Mears), whom he always considered to be a failure and a disappointment. The kid wants to do something meaningful for a living, and to do it ethically. What a fucking chump, right? Still, David is Allen’s son, and the old man has a standing invitation to him to come work for the family business, in any position he wants. Would you believe David shows up at the camp that very morning, asking for a job as a ranger? That isn’t quite what the elder Sangster had in mind, but he did say any position. That spur-of-the-moment hire goes over badly, however, with George Webster (John Kerry, of Punishment Park and Dolemite), the ranger that Sangster already has. Webster thinks David is being installed to keep tabs on him (Does that mean the producers hired Cameron Mitchell for only a single day’s work? You bet your ass it does!), and he holds the standard B-movie working-class asshole’s opinion of young men who grew up rich and went to college. George knows that he can’t just fire the boss’s kid, though, so instead he tries to keep David too busy to spy by saddling him with the crappiest, most menial jobs within a ranger’s ambit of responsibility.
As you might expect, the announcement that Memorial Valley Campground has no cabins, no plumbing, and no potable water thins out the opening weekend crowd considerably. And even some of the people who did initially decide to stick it out split when one couple (Chris Keene and costumer Julie Jachim) find their campsite inexplicably infested with venomous snakes. (Sabotage, you say?) That leaves just five parties settled in for the long haul to Monday. The most irritating of the bunch, for staff and audience alike, are a family of rich turds consisting of Rita (B.B. Selco), a Jewish mother straight out of Neil Simon’s nightmares; her henpecked husband, Chuck (Michael Spenard); and their uncontrollable adolescent son, Walter (David S. Perry). In comparison, aging outlaw bikers Eddie (Eddie D.), Morie (Charles Douglass), and Leon (Dan S. Fambeau) are mostly harmless, held in check by their wives, Emily (Karen Russell, from Murder Weapon and Phoenix the Warrior, credited here under her old “Dusty Woods” pseudonym), Sara (Lyvingston Holmes, of Raging Angels and Prophecy), and Flo (Christina Sullivan). Tom (Zig Roberts) and Rick (Michael Inglese), the two teen boys camping out with the girl they’d both like to bang, seem unlikely to cause much trouble either if left to the own devices, although one shouldn’t rule out the possibility of Wendy (Erin O’Leary) inciting them to competitive mischief. As for General Mintz (William Smith, from Crowhaven Farm and Atlantis, the Lost Continent) and his wife, Pepper (Linda Honeyman), all they want is to lurk in their RV all weekend, drinking whiskey and watching old Army-Navy football games on the VCR. Then there’s Cheryl (Lesa Lee), the slightly standoffish young woman camping alone. David develops the hots for Cheryl immediately upon seeing her, which naturally means that Webster makes it a personal mission to keep them apart.
For our purposes, the most important respect in which Walter is uncontrollable concerns his motorized all-terrain tricycle, which state law forbids him to ride in Memorial Valley. First David and then George do everything within their power to keep him off the fool thing, but Walter’s ingenuity at disobedience is truly impressive. Honestly, Allen Sangster should consider offering him a job, since he’d be a far better fit for the company culture than David. That’s not really the point, though. The point is that Memorial Valley has a protector far more effectual than either campground rangers or the state legislature, in the form of a teenaged caveman (Mark Caso) living alone down one of its less accessible gullies. This guy, in case it isn’t already obvious, is the culprit behind the sabotage campaign against the campground, and he takes much the same attitude toward Walter’s recreational shitheadedness. After slaying the boy and demolishing his trike, the Stone Age ecoterrorist drags the corpse back into the camp proper, and dumps it in front of the tent where Wendy is pointedly not fucking either Tom or Rick.
The discovery of Walter’s mangled body understandably gives rise to rumors of a rogue grizzly or mountain lion, but Webster’s actions in the aftermath hardly look like those of a man serious about dealing with such a creature. Indeed, from the way George organizes and conducts the hunt, you’d think he was trying to make sure Walter’s killer isn’t caught. That’s only about half-true, however. Webster just wants to make sure that he and he alone does the catching, for not only does he suspect that the twerp with the ATV and the three unfortunate laborers were killed by a human being, but he’s also pretty sure the human in question is his own son. Seventeen years ago, Stephen Webster was kidnapped. The police botched the job, though, when they set a trap for his abductor, and man and child alike disappeared into Memorial Valley, never to be seen again. George has been searching ever since, but to no avail. In point of fact, it was Webster who steered Allen Sangster toward building Memorial Valley Campground, just so that he’d have an excuse to spend all his time keeping an eye out for any sign of Stephen. That was also the real reason why George was so annoyed to see David show up— because the younger Sangster’s presence threatened to impinge on the hunt for the missing boy. I wouldn’t bet on a joyously tearful father-son reunion, however, even if the cave-teen really is Stephen Webster mostly grown up. To all appearances so far, he’s pretty much just an unusually clever animal at this point, and the only thing he seems to want is to get all these intruders the fuck out of his valley.
I rather suspect that Memorial Valley Massacre underwent several major rewrites over the course of its development, and that not enough care was taken to reconcile the leftovers from each previous draft to the brand new bits in each successive one. For example, although I’ve been assuming thus far that Stephen Webster is approximately nineteen years old when he embarks on his killing spree on and around the campground, there are some important details that don’t really make sense that way. Most importantly, it’s hard to imagine a toddler surviving alone in the woods long enough to grow up into anything, let alone a homicidal caveman. But if Stephen wasn’t alone (that is, if his kidnapper survived to raise him), or if he was old enough to stand half a chance of taking care of himself, then he ought to retain at least some concept of language, together with substantial memories of his former life and identity. And notwithstanding Stephen’s ingenuity at constructing booby traps out of naturally occurring materials, I don’t buy him knowing how to disable an engine or a CB radio unless he’s maintained frequent if irregular contact with civilization. Meanwhile, there are some hints in the dialogue to suggest that the lost-child angle wasn’t part of the original Memorial Day concept at all— that the killer at first was supposed to be an actual holdover from prehistory. On several occasions, David, Cheryl, and Deke speak of Memorial Valley as if it were some kind of Haggard-Doyle-Burroughs lost world, mentioning unique species of plant found nowhere else on Earth, and referring to a record of strange events there going back “eons.” I certainly don’t know this for a fact, but Memorial Valley Massacre would make a lot more sense if it were a case of “What if Madman Marz had been the world’s last Neanderthal?” getting ineptly overlaid with “What if Pamela Voorhees went to work at Camp Crystal Lake not to avenge Jason, but to rescue him?”
The frustrating thing is that those are both rather good hooks for a slasher movie. Unfortunately, they’re really an either/or proposition, to the extent that becomes annoying even to hint at one of them if you’re going to turn around and give us the other instead. Also, Memorial Valley Massacre falls into the deadly trap of explaining too much to function on the campfire-tale level, but not nearly enough to achieve logical consistency. That becomes especially problematic when the film will neither situate Stephen clearly on the sliding scale from malevolent monster to tragic savage, nor give the question itself enough serious attention to make that ambiguity feel valid or intended. And finally, Memorial Valley Massacre has way too many characters to make use of them all, but instead of treating most of them as Expendable Meat like any self-respecting decadent-phase slasher, it gets hopelessly bogged down trying and failing to develop the whole lot. Not only does that throw off the pacing, but it creates the impression of loose ends where none really exist. Like, it feels as if something has been left unresolved when nothing comes of the mutual disapproval between David and Allen Sangster, but their family strife has nothing to do with the story, and isn’t worth sorting out. Similarly, who cares what game Wendy is playing with her two would-be boyfriends, or why Tom and Rick are so willing to put up with it? Who cares that Eddie is gradually becoming a leader without a pack, losing one follower after another to creeping maturity? Only with General Mintz does Memorial Valley Massacre get it really right, giving him enough eccentricity to be memorable without misleadingly cuing us to become invested in some illusory subplot that will never materialize.
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