The Slumber Party Massacre Trilogy

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE

A fun slasher film from 1982, Slumber Party Massacre has a pretty basic plot (The Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Horror describes the project as “virtually plotless”).  A high school student named Trish throws a party for some classmates.  Trish invites her new neighbor (Valerie), who declines the invitation.  An escaped mental patient named Russ Thorn crashes the party and picks off a few of the teens (and a neighbor guy and a pizza delivery man), generally by using a power drill as a murder weapon.  Valerie and her younger sister (Courtney) investigate the happenings next door.  Ultimately some of the would-be victims fight back, and Russ Thorn ends up on the wrong end of a machete. 

I’d never seen Slumber Party Massacre before, and I’m sorry that it slipped under my radar until now.  There’s a lot of wicked humor (some subtle) woven into the teens’ dialogue (which is sharp and realistic) and their actions (which start as believable and become less so once the group realizes there’s a killer lurking outside).  For fans of the slasher sub-genre, the film includes the usual staples: lots of gratuitous nudity and teens smoking pot, drinking, and making out.  These elements are woven into an entertaining tale about a murderous rampage and the ultimate survivors thereof.  The gore is minimal.  The early eighties were a wellspring of stalk-and-slash fare.  Slumber Party Massacre is one of the better offerings from that golden era.

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE 2

The middle film in the trilogy flat-out stinks.  This time around, the protagonist is Courtney (Valerie’s younger sister in the first movie) five years after she helped to kill Russ Thorn.  She’s now one of two guitarists in a four-piece all-girl band, and one of the members has a father who has agreed to let the girls use his new condo for a weekend getaway.  The band members (with three guys in tow) party hard, but nightmares plague Courtney.  One night while she’s making out with a fellow, the killer from her dreams (a greasy-haired leather-clad fellow with a huge drill-necked guitar) seemingly emerges into reality and kills Courtney’s boyfriend.  The Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Horror describes the killer as “an Eddie Cochran-style rock demon with a quiff and pointed leather boots who sports an outrageous drill at the end of his guitar and commits his murders while performing rockabilly numbers.”  The killer stalks the young adults (sometimes pausing to sing and dance – seriously) and picks off a few until only Courtney remains.  Courtney lights him afire and sends him plummeting off a roof.  An epilogue suggests that most or all of the movie was a dream within a nightmare.

This project runs only 72 minutes before the end credits roll, but even so feels too long.  I liked the idea of following a survivor from the first movie, and at first she seemed like a realistically-traumatized character, but simulated reality is at a minimum by the end of the narrative.  At some point I realized that the events I was watching were not meant to depict a literal reality, but I was hoping the explanation would be more sophisticated than just “it was all a dream.”  Avoid.

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE 3

With a plot unrelated to the first two installments, part 3 is not as awful as part 2 but not nearly as clever and enjoyable as part one.  In this one, a young adult named Jackie throws a slumber party with a gaggle of female friends while her parents are out of town.  Some of their guy friends crash the party.  Another (Ken) is invited over.  Turns out that Ken is an impotent psychopath who uses a phallic drill as a weapon to pick off the partygoers one by one.  The identity of the killer is kept secret for awhile with a few suspects in the mix (including an unusual neighbor across the street and a “weird” guy who stalks the girls after seeing them on the beach).  In the third act, some of the girls fight back, blind Ken with bleach, shoot him in the leg with a harpoon gun, and smash things over his head.  Jackie finishes him off with his own drill.

Now that I’ve seen the whole series, I’d recommend checking out part one and skipping the sequels.