Midweek Mayhem: The Slumber Party Massacre
Midweek Mayhem is a weekly column discussing horror films of varying sub-genres.
The poster for the Slumber Party Massacre makes me long for the video stores of yesteryear. Its central sleazy delights (bikini-clad women and a foreboding killer) were the order of the day in most back-of-the-store sections where you could find it alongside Blood Rage, The Mutilator, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any other Vipco, Canon or Vestron title. Having seen the cover a million times but not the actual film itself, I figured it was time to deep-dive into the Massacre sub-genre, which exists in that that moniker has been used so many times in low-rent horror titles (see Nail Gun Massacre, Massacre at Central High, Drive-In Massacre and the hilariously titled Mountain Top Motel Massacre). But seeing as Amy Jones' film is the most famous and successful of the bunch (spawning two sequels), I thought it best to start there.
Straight off the bat, Slumber Party Massacre sets its sights squarely on tongue-in-cheek humor. Trish (Michele Michaels), a popular high-schooler decides to throw an old school slumber party for her girlfriends to try and recapture their friendship. With her parents gone and the boys uninvited, the stage is set for a night of weed, pizza, boy talk & skimpy underwear (for real, it's astounding to me that the film wasn't written by a fourteen year old boy). Unfortunately for Trish and her friends, an escaped mental patient, Russ Thorn (Michael Villela), is once again on the loose in Venice Beach, prowling the neighborhood for new victims.
The scant seventy seven minute run time plays out more or less exactly how you'd imagine. Thorn spots the slumber party, isolates the girls by cutting the phone lines, then proceeds to pick them off one by one. It's absolutely formulaic and nonsensical, down to the ridiculously calm reaction to brutal murder by the girls themselves, but Jones and the cast seem to be having fun making it, so the film at least has a basic indie-film charm throughout. That's not all though, formulaic as it may be, slasher fans should be delighted with the escalating gore and Thorn's OTT lunatic villain but it's Jones' surprisingly smart direction that elevates the Slumber Party Massacre from bargain bin to potential cult classic.
Rather than use her directorial effort as a cash & grab slasher entry, Jones' film is smart enough to comment on the inherent sexism in the sub-genre. It's goofy, of course, but looking at the film as a whole it's full of hilarious winks to the audience. The two teenage boys practically foam at the mouth while watching the girls change through the window, epitomizing the Male Gaze, while the killer's motivation seems nothing more than a personification of the Internet Nice Guy: he loves women so much, but they don't like him, that's why he is the way he is. Couple these points with the literal emasculation of the killer at the end by way of rendering his long phallic drill into a tiny stump and you've got a...kind of brilliant slasher subversion.
That's not to say the film is brilliant, it's unbearably slow for the first thirty minutes and its cheapness won't work for a lot of people, but if given a chance, a lot of horror fans will find something to love in Jones' 80s, slice & dice epic.