Tourist Trap

TOURIST TRAP

A bizarre and chilling little movie that gave me nightmares after I first saw it on cable TV when I was a teenager, Tourist Trap follows a young woman named Molly who gets stranded in the middle of nowhere with a group of friends due to vehicular engine trouble.  A seemingly friendly fellow named Mr. Slausen happens along and offers to help repair the Jeep.  He drives Molly and her friends to his out-of-business museum that houses assorted mannequins and wax dummies.  Trouble ensues when some of the girls get nosy and snoop around the only neighboring house (which Slausen claims is inhabited by someone named Davey).  In the house lurks a homicidal masked fellow with telekinetic powers that he uses to animate mannequins, slam and bolt doors, and slide windows shut.  “Davey” (eventually revealed to be Slausen in disguise) picks off the young adults one by one until Molly is the only survivor.  She manages to kill Slausen with an axe as he dances with a mannequin. 

Tourist Trap boasts some freakish and nightmarish imagery, particularly in the prologue when a young man ventures into an old gas station and encounters assorted moving dummies (the one that springs out from behind a closed door gave me especially vivid bad dreams when I was a kid).  Molly is a somewhat passive protagonist through much of the tale, and there’s one absurd moment when she ventures into a body of water in an effort to hide and Slausen emerges up from under the surface behind her (as if he somehow knew exactly where she’d be at that moment), but Tourist Trap might well spook you if you can overlook these flaws.  Initially released in 1979, Tourist Trap holds up well decades after it first traumatized audiences.  Check it out for some fine jolts and scares.