THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE

And here we are. THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE. Easily one of the best known slasher films, if only for it's title and typically exploitative video art. We've all heard of it. We all know the artwork. Four young girls cowering in fear while a man stands open-legged in the foreground, a long, threatening drill dangling between them. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of this film's cover art, it's worth at least one hundred words of exposition.


The film is not as bad as many make it out to be, but it is still nowhere near as good as it's cult classic status might imply. It's a film with a bad case of tonal schizophrenia. It often veers between the typical FRIDAY THE 13TH-style scares, sleazy sexploitation and creaky comedy, sometimes all in the space of a single scene. The reason for this is well known by now but worth a rehash. As it was designed, THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE was to be a spoof of the already mega-popular slasher film. Taking the now standard HALLOWEEN set-up - psycho butchers a bunch of party girls in a house while another, more "proper" girl, babysitting in a house next door, begins to suspect that something strange is going on - as it's starting point, the filmmakers began to craft what would have turned out to be a very superficial, frankly rather dull film.


The powers that be, however, wanted to compete in the market. So THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE was injected with rougher stuff. To say the two elements don't mesh well would be an understatement. At no point does THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE feel like a finished film. Though it's schizophrenia adds a kind of idiotic charm to the film, it would have been better off as a tried and true slasher. The more horrific elements are easily the film's strongest points.


The film's screenwriter, Rita Mae Brown - best known to modern audiences as the author of the Mrs. Murphy line of throwaway mystery novels - was a well known feminist writer during the 1970s. You might expect then, in a genre repeatedly nailed to a cross for being misogynistic and sexist, for the film to be quite different than your regular slasher film. You might expect an angry film, a vicious deconstruction of the sub-genre. But it isn't that at all. Instead of turning in a blistering critique of these kinds of films, Brown and director Amy Holden Jones decide instead to parody the slasher, taking the cliches and conventions the genre is built on and amping them up, making them even less subtle - if such a thing were possible. We have then a film which doesn't insult the slasher film as much as it insults the people who watch films slasher films. It never once betrays our expectations. It never once tries to do anything new. It walks the line perfectly, feeding us every single scenario we have ever seen in these films. It sometimes feels like Brown and Jones are thumbing their nose at us, looking down at us, feeding us like complacent pigs everything they know we want to see. It feels like an inside joke.


But whatever grand design they may have had, it is repeatedly brushed aside by a series of set-pieces that are unexpectedly gruesome. As I said before, these are the best scenes the film has to offer. Many of them, like the stalking of a very young, very beautiful Brinke Stevens through an abandoned school, are very well shot, much better filmed and edited than anything else the film has to offer. The final confrontation between the girls and the power drill-wielding killer - which includes the most Freudian of all the film's imagery, a young woman "castrating" the killer's power drill phallus with a machete - is a very tense, quite creepy and absolutely satisfying climax. It feels so out of place that it almost feels like a climax from a much better film. It's these moments, the moments when THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE leaves the guffaws behind, that give the film some power.


So how then should we approach this film? If we hold it up to be a parody of the slasher film, does it work? I would say "no". It plays far too close to the rules to be an actual parody. STUDENT BODIES did that sort of thing much better. In that film, characters are killed with egg plants and paper clips, murders are preceded by audio-visual warnings and every situation is hyper and over-the-top. THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE is too restrained to be a parody and it relies on the cliches and conventions instead of lampooning them. So does it work as a straight slasher film? I would have to say "yes". The bottom line is that the film is goofy and intentionally funny at times but it's meaner moments, as well as it's slickly filmed set-pieces, turn it into something much darker by the film's end. This is a confused film, but one that deserves a small amount of praise.


Recommended.