August 23, 2018
Written by: Rita Mae Brown
Starring: Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, Michael Villela
Budget: $250,000
Quote: "You're pretty. 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. Yes..."
Trivia: Rita Mae Brown wrote a screenplay for a parody of teen/slasher flicks and titled it "Sleepless Nights". However, when she submitted it to the producers, they filmed it as if it weren't a parody and retitled it "Slumber Party Massacre". As a result, the movie displays a lot more humor, both intended and unintended, than others of this genre.
Drill, baby drill! From Roger Corman (who else?) comes one of the most aggressively misogynistic films of the 1980s. In this movie, women are literally being torn apart by a long phallic tool wielded by a crazed man. The film is chocked full of gratuitous nudity and tracking shots that are meant to purposefully exploit the female body (they move to key areas during shower scenes and group clothes changing scenes). Meanwhile, the girls in the film wear next to nothing are too focused on boys to realize they are about to be murdered. This leaves all of us with the important question, what sicko wrote and directed this filth? Written and directed by women. In fact the entire Slumber Party Massacre franchise is directed by women (See how I set up that amazing twist at the end? See? Alright, I'm no M. Night Shyamalan, but at least I didn't make you sit through 90 minutes of people running away from wind like he did in The Happening... seriously M. Night, what happened?).
Written by feminist activist Rita Mae Brown as a parody of the slasher genre, Brown never intended the film to become an actual horror movie. In fact she hoped it would make a feminist statement about the misogyny of horror films and she herself was horrified when she found out they were turning it into an actual horror film. Her original title was "Sleepless Nights," which the directed changed to "Don't Open the Door," and finally (I'm assuming) producer and exploitation lord (415 producing credit to his name and counting) Roger Corman settled on the great title "The Slumber Party Massacre."
Since the screenplay was originally conceived as a parody, the film has a lot of intentional and unintentional humorous moments that bring light to the film and make it a really fun watch. Watching the film, you can see a few of the places in the film that were meant to parody the genre: After discovering the pizza man with his eyes drilled out, one of the girls asks if the pizza is still warm and proceeds to eat it while the box lays on his dead body. In another scene, a coffee pot breaks because it has been sitting on the stove too long and overheated which she picks up and handles all over while examining it (its supposed to be hot, right?).
The film's director is Amy Jones who will go on direct Mystic Pizza and Indecent Proposal before moving on to directing television. This film marks Jones' directorial debut which, in order to get the job, she had to turn down an editing job on E.T. (and if you ask me, The Slumber Party Massacre is a much better film, at least a much more fun film that holds up better than Spielberg's alien movie).
The plot of the film is very simple: A man with a excessively long power drill wearing a Canadian Tuxedo begins murdering girls at a high school (first in a van then in the locker room... classic slasher kill spots). Later he moves on to one of the girl's houses where they are having a slumber party (yup, another go to slasher location). A bunch of girls are killed until the girl next door (the extremely beautiful Robin Stille, that plays the sexy girl next door so well) comes to investigate and get wrapped up in the murders. Eventually the killer is killed (I don't think that's a spoiler... it's a slasher parody after all).
The Slumber Party Massacre is just a damn great movie! The guy who plays the killer, Michael Villella does a great job. His wide, crazed eyes and murder weapon make him the perfect horror villain. He would be as memorable as the other classic if he had appeared in the latter films (Although isn't there an Elvis guy with a drill guitar in one of the sequels? That was pretty great too!). The nudity is unwarranted but necessary. We get breast in the first two minutes and it doesn't stop there. The killings are also great! I mean the guy drills his victims. How cool is that?
The Slumber Party Massacre is a movie that isn't afraid to laugh at itself. It has the insight to realize that, yes, the slasher genre is formulaic, and yes it is exploitative, but that doesn't mean it isn't one of the most fun ways to spend ninety minutes. All Hail the Slasher!
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