.jpg "The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)")
The first film has an interesting pedigree. Rita Mae Brown (the author and feminist activist) wrote it, and Amy Holden put it on screen; a slasher flick originally made by women. Fairly progressive for the 1980s. One could be excused for not figuring that out with all the long, lingering shots of naked young ladies on display. Brown's screenplay was meant as a parody of the genre, but Roger Corman, the producer, had other ideas and wanted a straight horror movie. The result is a film that falls between those two poles. I mean, Corman has a reputation to live up to. Though I would have liked to have seen Brown's original treatment, Sleepless Nights, before it got "Cormanized."
The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)
The premise is as simple as it gets. Trish, a high schooler (though we do hear she is 18), throws a slumber party while her parents are away. And there is Russ Thorn, an escaped murderer, making his way through the neighborhood with a huge power drill.
I will leave you to imagine the rest. Don't tax yourself; you'll do more work than the movie does.
Ok. So, in practice, the movie is better than it sounds. It is quicker than your average early eighties slasher and has a good deal of humor. The girls are convincing as friends and not just a roster of victims biding their time. It has some self-awareness without tipping into full parody. Then there's the drill as a weapon, hardly subtle.
It has all the worst of the genre too, the nudity and the voyeurism, which makes the fact that Brown and Jones were behind it all the more of an oddity. They do not so much subvert the formula as work within it, giving the exploitation market what it wants while having a word or two with its assumptions.
You will see some familiar faces in the cast. Robin Stille is Valerie, Debra De Liso is Kim, and Brinke Stevens is one of the party guests. Stille, in particular, would make a name for herself as a scream queen in films like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, which, oddly enough is not on my list of movies to watch.
Valerie is one of the better characters. For most of the running time, she stays away from the main party, but when the killing starts, she becomes much more central. I like that the girls are not left to wait for rescue.
It is a cheap, at times ridiculous movie, very much of its era, but also efficient. Russ Thorn is an escaped killer with a drill, no need for any complicated mythology. The peril is in how fast a night out with a group of ordinary girls can become a nightmare. That is why it works.
.jpg "Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)")
By the time the sequel comes around five years later, subtlety is seen as unnecessary. This movie was also unnecessary, but here we are. We also lost the "The" somewhere.
Valerie’s younger sister Courtney Bates is now a teenager and still reeling from what befell her sister. She has nightmares of a rockabilly type in leather who has an electric guitar with a huge drill on it.
Yes, it is what it is.
Crystal Bernard (before her run on Wings) plays Courtney (replacing Jennifer Meyers from the first film), and Deborah Brock wrote and directed. The film takes the original concept and heads straight for A Nightmare on Elm Street country, muddling dreams, trauma, and reality until you can hardly tell where one ends and the next begins. Atanas Ilitch is the Driller Killer, and he is nothing like Russ Thorn. He will sing, dance, and put the boot in to Courtney like someone who's part rockabilly frontman, part Freddy Krueger, and has been given a guitar of no practical use whatsoever.
It is all rather absurd. I cannot say it is good, but it is memorable enough.
Courtney is what makes it work. The trauma has not left her even if she was spared the first movie’s events by dint of her sister. Her friends dismiss her visions as nightmares until the impossible shows up. In that way, the sequel is less an exercise in the escaped-murderer genre and more about the dread of something from your past coming back for you.
The Los Angeles Times made the same observation in their review of the day, drawing a line to the Nightmare on Elm Street movies and asking whether Courtney is seeing things or in the grip of a hallucination. I find that more useful than the guitar drill.
Jackson Connections and West End Girls
I get some mileage out of both these films for my West End Girls adventure, if not quite what they set out to give.
From the first I take the closeness of young women in a space where they ought to be secure. It matters, since I have no wish for the victims in West End Girls to be just another name on Edwin Harrow's (my slasher) tally. They are college freshmen with their friends and routines, their jokes and summer plans and the odd complaint. Some share a room; others share a wardrobe. There is always one studying while the rest want to go out.
When the killings come, the ordinariness of it before then only heightens the intrusion.
The Slumber Party Massacre gets this right on its own. The girls go about their business, and the horror comes anyway.
Slumber Party Massacre II offers a different thing: the reiteration of trauma. That is nearer to the supernatural heart of West End Girls. What happens in 1985 is not some other killer emulating Edwin Harrow. It is the same horror from 50 years ago.
Edwin was fixated on Marian Ashcroft and Clara Deane, but his anger reached out to other freshman women he though were laughing at him. From May 25 to 30, 1935 the original murders ran their course. Marian lived to tell of it, some did not.
Now history haunts the present.
I want the adventure to read as a haunting in a slasher's outfit. At first, the characters spot the usual: a girl alone at night, a tail, a body left on the emptying campus. All the signs of a slasher-killer.
Then it does not add up. A man is seen in clothes from another era. A victim says she can hear music from 1935. A dorm room seems older for a moment. One has a dream of a stranger and finds her picture in the yearbook.
The past isn't recalled so much as attempted again.
These two movies make that clear to me. The Slumber Party Massacre has the social world of the young women. Slumber Party Massacre II suggests that one can survive a horror and still not be free of it; trauma can become something of a supernatural affair.
The trick with West End Girls is to put those together and keep the women as people and not mere victims.
Edwin had no such qualms, viewing them as objects for his resentment. The adventure must do better.
October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
Viewed: 35
First Time Views: 23
No comments:
Post a Comment