Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

Tagline: Close your eyes for a second... and sleep forever.

Curiosity: This one is another childhood classic.

Plot: Typical naked lusty teen Trish (Michele Michaels) is having a party and invites her basketball teammates over for a night of smoking, drinking, and talking about boys. Her teammate Val (Robin Stille) doesn’t go, though. She dominates the basketball court, but she doesn’t how to handle the court… of conversation. That’s OK by Trish and her friends, though. They still light up a couple of doobies and have fun.

Then a dude with a giant power drill (Michael Villella) shows up and murders them all.

Thoughts: My best friend in middle school was this cat named Rob. His mother was way more lenient than mine when it came to movies, so we spent many an afternoon renting horror movies. Let’s face it; when you’re 12, a title like Slumber Party Massacre is going to grab you. At the time, I found the film titillating and frightening. Death by power drill is a bad way to go. Also, there are boobs.

I hadn’t seen the film in maybe 12 years or so, hadn’t really considered it until its recent re-release on DVD. A few reviews talked up the film’s touches of feminism and humor, to a point where it over-intellectualized what I remembered as a fairly straightforward slasher flick. Also, there are boobs. So I was shocked to find out that, yeah, Slumber Party Massacre is actually a lot smarter than the typical Halloween rip-off.

That’s not to say the film doesn’t follow conventions. It still has a typical plot – promiscuous teens get picked off by a psycho killer. And the gore is pretty tame compared to the recent works of Eli Roth, Ti West, and Alexandre Aja. But that’s part of what helps the film succeed. It’s not bogged down by aged effects and never tips its hand straight into the horror genre. It’s really more of a black comedy. I can’t believe I remembered the scene where a girl keeps almost discovering a dead body in a refrigerator all these years later, but it turns out this is one of the film’s most iconic scenes. Other parts are legitimately scary, like the implied drill attacks. Villella spends most of the movie lingering in the margins. He only gets one scene with dialogue, but he makes it count. He's damn creepy telling the girls that his murder spree is an act of love, and he does this weird thing where he cocks his head around like a bird.

Arguments for the film’s feminist bent are valid too. The movie flips plenty of conventions, both for horror films and societal norms. Women are the ones with stereotypically masculine jobs (gym coach, carpenter, electrician). Men are the ones who die horrible, protracted deaths while the women get off relatively easy. And the symbolism of the ending, not to get all spoiler-y, is so forehead-slappingly obvious that it becomes awesome. Yeah, this was a Roger Corman feature, but director Amy Holden Jones (she also wrote Beethoven and Mystic Pizza AND worked on Taxi Driver) and writer Rita Mae Brown infuse the movie with way more quality than such a feature probably deserves. Also, there are boobs.

Reflection: Jones turned down E.T. to make this movie.