“All of you are very pretty. I love you. It takes a lot of love for a person to… do this. You know you want it. You’ll like it.”
The Slumber Party Massacre, 1982 (Michele Michaels), New World Pictures
I’m going to have to get analytical now. I knew this day would come, where I would have to do a write-up of Slumber Party Massacre, taking into account the effect of slasher films on the market and then how this movie impacted slasher films moving forward. If you read descriptions of the movie on other pages, they will, more often than not, point to Amy Jones, the director, and Rita Mae Brown, the writer as they attempted to deconstruct the subgenre and provide a parody of the material in its place. While the movie succeeds in aping the formula, a very thick tongue is planted firmly in-cheek, but only for those who can appreciate it.
We start with the bold red titles, and the sound of organs not out-of-place in a Vincent Price movie. Mom and Dad are off on a vacation, or something, leaving Trish (Michele Michaels) in charge of the house, so she decides to throw a party (or a “slumber” party, as the case may be – according to my research, slumber parties usually involve pizza and lesbian experimentation, but I can’t be sure). Meanwhile, a lunatic (who uses a power drill) is on the loose, killing women everywhere he goes. I wonder what brand of drill he uses. We get fleeting glimpses of the horrible man as he watches Trish and her friends. He seriously looks like a sex offender. He has the glazed-over look of a man who recently had a vasectomy.
After basketball, there is an extended shower sequence with all the girls, and Jones spends an impressive amount of time lingering on naked female flesh (more than in any other slasher movie I’ve seen). I suspect Jones and Brown set out to indict the male-dominated industry of slasher movies, or possibly call our attention to the amount of violence perpetrated against women in most movies. Poor Brinke Stevens (Haunting Fear), who won’t be going to the party, gets locked inside the school and has to run from our driller-killer while her friends remain blissfully ignorant and on their way to the coolest slumber party ever! I’m kidding, of course. It’s really kind of boring.
Par for the course, we have a couple of fake-out gags, where the purpose seems to be to frighten young women with ridiculous situations. A hand comes out of nowhere to frighten a female pedestrian. A drill breaks through a front door because another young lady is installing a peep-hole (come on!). A shadowy figure walks slowly downstairs and frightens another young woman.
All of these gags occur within minutes. What’s the point of that? To show that women are easily horrified? I get it. As a matter of fact, I’m easily horrified. In fact, I’m horrified right now writing this. Aaagh! I will say Jones has a great photographer’s eye. The compositions and colors of interior shots are deep, dark, and rich with atmospheric lighting, but when accompanied by the Vincent Price organ, the whole thing seems incredibly silly.
The first order of business is weed. The girls smoke up and talk about sex, and who the sluttiest girl is, and how to get to first base, and how their menstrual cycles line up, or something like that. Honestly, I wasn’t paying attention in between fake-out gags (we’re up to two hundred by this point in the running time). It’s weird that I like the idea of the movie more than the actual movie.
We have extremely dark night shots (I’ve always preferred that realistic lighting to this new-fangled modern lighting where you can see everything in any given exterior shot), sounds of dogs barking in the background, some heavy breathing, and POV shots. The Slumber Party Massacre has all the trappings of a great slasher film (great photography, great editing), but Brown’s premise is lost in the thick, choking fog of social commentary, not unlike many movies produced today. We need more entertainment, less moralizing!
The second order of business is pizza (no anchovies!). The pizza guy shows up, in the midst of all the female confessionals and make-overs, but he has bloody holes in his eyes so I’m guessing he won’t be getting a tip. My favorite bit in the movie has one of the girls eating the pizza while they try to figure out their next move. A particularly telling scene has a girl collapse to the garage floor and the killer brandishes his extra-long drill bit between his legs. Brian De Palma would imitate this shot two years later in Body Double but to much better effect.
The killer cuts the phone line, and off we go! We’re more than halfway through the movie before these dim-wits get a clue. I can’t blame the girls, though. Rita Mae Brown is the true killer of this promising story. In the end, one of our heroines uses a machete to chop the end off of the killer’s drill-bit, effectively castrating him. There are some very interesting ideas at play here, but Brown and Jones are more interested in making a bold political statement than in entertaining or scaring their audience, and that’s unfortunate.
