The Slumber Party Massacre (

1982

)

I always find it amusing when pseudo-intellectuals pretend that a crappy movie is good for political reasons. I suspect that people who don’t write film reviews as a hobby might not be able to appreciate it, but I like teasing through their absurd arguments and seeing in which ways they are bending the truth and where they are outright lying. Sometimes I have to stop and wonder if these writers realize how full of shit they are, or if they can successfully fool themselves into really thinking the absurdities they put forth constitute a valid argument. I’m sure that at least of few of them have this much self-awareness, which only makes the whole act of pretending a shitty movie is good all the more amusing.

I’ll admit, I expected that I would discover some of these essays when I started researching The Slumber Party Massacre. However, I had no idea that the vein would be this rich and this varied. We have essayists arguing that The Slumber Party Massacre is feminist because it passes the Bechdel test, because it has female characters with a semblance of a personality, even (and most amusing to me) because it has a lot of gratuitous female nudity (looking forward to the feminist defense of Body Double (1984)). There’s a deluge of these essays, each one with reasons supporting the film that are dumber than the last, and most so effusive with their praise that it borders on absurd. “One of the superior entries in a notoriously uninventive sub-genre” “as good a monument to the slasher’s golden age as any film of the era” “now considered a classic” The commentators say; “Come the fuck on” I rejoin. The Slumber Party Massacre is quite frankly, a by-the-numbers slasher with little to recommend it.

If you don’t believe me just take a quick look at the film’s plot. The film follows Trish and her high school friends Kim, Jackie, and Diane as they get together for a slumber party while Trish’s parents are out of town. Trish is keen to invite the new transfer girl Valerie to join them, but Diane arbitrarily despises her and loudly communicates this to Trish. So loudly in fact that Valerie overhears them and storms out in a huff. So instead of paling around with the girls, Valerie will be hanging out at home with her younger sister Courtney (how much younger is anybody’s guess, as the actress playing her is in her early 20s like all the other girls, but she’s trying her damndest to look somewhere between 10 and 14).

The party isn’t going to be all chicks either. Diane’s boyfriend, John, will be coming along to screw her at some point. The local horn-dogs Jeff and Neil also turn up to peep on the girls while they’re changing and add to the body count once the massacre part of the title begins in earnest. Doing the aforementioned massacring will be Russ Thorne, who has got to rival the guy from Final Exam (1981) as the most nondescript slasher movie antagonist of all time. The only part of him that stands out is the huge power drill he lugs around and uses on his victims. In classic slasher villain fashion, he starts by picking off people around the periphery of the plot. First up is a lady that works for the telephone company, then Linda a girl who couldn’t make it to the slumber party, then Trish’s neighbor Mr. Content, then the pizza guy (who for some reason gets it worse than any of the named characters having his eyes dug out of his skull). With the expendable chaff out of the way, he can move onto the main characters.

The plot relies on a few minor absurdities. The guests at the titular slumber party need to periodically go deaf to ignore the screams of the victims and the roar of the killer’s power tool. Seriously, at one point the girls inside the house don’t hear Diane scream and honk her car horn from inside an attached garage. As if to drive home the nonsense of this situation, Valerie and Courtney hear this just fine in the house across the street. The viewer also has to pretend that aside from Trish and Valerie’s houses, the entire suburban neighborhood is abandoned. There are no neighbors that could overhear the constant racket coming from the massacre, nor any cars that pass through, not even the occasional dog walker. Where the hell do these girls live, the middle of the Sahara Desert?

If all this sounds pretty by-the-numbers, to you, that’s because it is. The Slumber Party Massacre is not a completely incompetent film, but it is thoroughly mediocre with one or two interesting elements, adrift in a veritable ocean of other mediocre but enjoyable slasher films. It’s dumb, make no mistake, but this is a subgenre with such gems as The Mutilator (1984), so we are still well within acceptable tolerances for nonsense. But even if we’re being charitable, there is very little here to distinguish The Slumber Party Massacre from its peers. Do you have any idea how many Friday the 13th (1980) wannabes were released between 1980 and 1985? It’s easier to count them by the dozen!

So why are the professional typists so determined to pretend this movie is great? That’s simple, the script was written by Rita Mae Brown. Yes, that Rita Mae Brown, Betty Friedman’s Sapphic rival, the author of Rubyfruit Jungle, and all those books about mystery-solving cats. What’s more, the film was also directed by a woman, Amy Holden Jones, who was so keen to make the jump to directing that she turned down the chance to edit E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) (in hindsight a startlingly bad career decision). So, naturally, there is a rush to reinterpret the film as less a thrilling horror movie and more as a dry feminist treatise.

The thing that most commentators neglect to mention is that the two women were not exactly collaborating on the film. Indeed, Amy Holden Jones was given the reins of the film when she approached Roger Corman about working as a director for New World Pictures, and the producer pulled Brown’s script off the shelf with a: ‘See what you can do with this.’ Brown’s original script may have been a feminist skewering of slasher movie tropes, but Jones seemed to have little intention of living up to this vision. She wanted to make a hit horror movie and follow the career path of other Corman school alumni like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. If Corman wanted a sleazy horror movie he was going to get one, and if Brown’s original script wasn’t suitably sleazy then Jones was not above tweaking it to fit her new vision.

As a result, it’s a bit of fun to watch the commentators twist themselves into knots trying to prove that The Slumber Party Massacre is secretly a feminist masterpiece instead of a scuzzy little bit of vile exploitation. Most of these essays will cite things that don’t prove the point that they’re arguing or even things that most, if not all, slasher films from the era do. Peyton Brock over at collider sets the stage by praising the film for passing the Bechdel Test “with flying colors” while failing to note that it is hardly rare or even uncommon for slasher films to manage to have two female characters holding a conversation about something other than a man. I look forward to the articles from Peyton praising the ground-breaking feminism of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Black Christmas (1974), Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), Hell Night (1981), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)! Of course, this is par for course when it comes to film criticism and the Bechdel test. When a critic likes a film then passing the Bechdel test is a huge deal, proving irrevocably that the movie in question is a progressive masterpiece; when they don’t the test is suddenly meaningless quibble that only has significance when applied in aggregate. It’s almost like basing film criticism off of a throwaway joke in a 40-year-old comic book is a bad idea or something!

Still, this is far from the only example of pretending that an average event in the genre is a brilliant feminist subversion, as nearly every essay I looked at claimed that the fact that the girls were well-written and believable was proof of Slumber Party Massacre’s feminist bonafides. Nolan Murray over at the avclub put it most succinctly when he argues that “The big difference is that Brown and Jones make their female victims into actual characters, who enjoy each other’s company and spend more time than usual conversing between murders.” While there is no shortage of two-dimensional female (and male) characters in slashers it’s absurd to say that this is the rule across the genre. There are plenty of slasher films with believable female characters. Indeed, due to the final girl trope, it’s a fair bit easier to find well-crafted female characters than male ones, as nearly all the male characters in slashers fall into the expendable meat category. Moreover, holding up the girls in The Slumber Party Massacre as compelling, well-written, or even believable is a bit of a stretch in my opinion. To me, they smack of what a middle-aged lesbian thinks straight teenage girls are like. Certainly, I doubt that many high school girls spend their leisure time debating who scored the runs in last night’s baseball game or get into heated spats over who is a better basketball player.

Some critics were a bit smarter, and at least tried to pretend that the common genre tropes were something original and subversive. It is especially amusing to watch commentators like Emily Jacobson at bloody-disgusting pretend that the gratuitous nudity is somehow a satire of the male gaze and genre conventions. The only problem with this theory is that there’s no joke here for the satire to hang on. Now if the nudity were exaggerated in some way or occurring in moments where it doesn’t make any diegetic sense, that would be one thing. However, nothing like that occurs, the girls get naked when they shower after gym class, when they change into their nighties, and when they sneak off to screw their boyfriends. If there was a chick prancing about nude like the foreign exchange student in Not Another Teen Movie (2001), you might have a case but as it stands it's just good-old-fashioned sleazy exploitation. The closest thing we get to a joke about it is the way the camera panning up and down girls’ bodies while they’re showering. This may seem humorous to modern audiences since, outside of porn, we’re all but starved for any small sliver of sexuality in our horror movies, but trust me by 1970s and 1980s standards this is just standard stuff.

Moreover, the director herself confirms that the nudity was less of an artistic decision and more of a contractual obligation. She was, after all, working for Roger Corman, who was famous for letting filmmakers do whatever the hell they wanted so long as they crammed enough tits and blood into their film that he could sell it. It seems that Jones had taken a similar deal to the one Corman previously offer Jonathan Demme when he was making Caged Heat (1974). Put some asses on the screen and Corman promised to put asses in the seats.

Of course, these essays wouldn’t be very amusing if all the commentariat simply pretended that typical genre norms were revolutionary. Far more interesting is when the critics make things up about the movie that have no bearing whatsoever to reality. Take Eric Langberg’s essay on medium where he argues that “in offering up to the camera lingering shots of the Playgirl models in the buff, the film also offers gratuitous male flesh for erotic consumption, which is far more rare in slasher films.” Ignoring the fact that Langberg doesn’t know about the word “rarer” eagle-eyed viewers may notice that the scenes he’s describing do not exist anywhere in the film. There are no lingering shots of the playgirl centerfolds. Sure, we see Courtney rifle through the magazine, but we never see the interior contents, only the cover which is a closeup of Sylvester Stallone’s face. Indeed, even a traditional slasher like Hell Night (1981) has more male nudity than this film, at least there we can point to one or two hunky guys taking off their shirts!

Not to be outdone, Willow Catelyn Maclay over at mubi decided to not limit herself by making something up about The Slumber Party Massacre, but instead concoct nonsense about the entire genre. In-between implying that women suffer disproportionately gruesome fates in slasher films (a fact that is not even true for today’s movie where slightly more women die than men) she drops this chestnut: “The close-up on a woman’s face in a slasher film is almost non-existent.” There are close ups of women's faces in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Black Christmas (1974), and Halloween (1978). I'm sure that there are plenty of other examples, as those were just the first three I checked! For a shot that is "almost non-existent" it sure does turn up a lot. I'm not sure if Maclay is being deliberately disingenuous, or if she is actually brain-dead enough to believe her absurd assertions. In either case though it's safe to discard anything she has to say on the subject.

Then there are the arguments that are so utterly wrong-header I struggle to understand how anyone could advance them in good faith. Shuan Alexander at screen-queens argues that the film’s poster is a feminist triumph because it “puts it’s female protagonists within a position of authority which has often been reserved for the male characters in movies.” The position of authority in question: squirming on the floor in terror as they look up at the hulking figure of the male murderer! Did I mention that all the ladies here are in their underwear; does that make it more or less empowering? Somehow, I doubt that Shaun Alexander would be making this particular argument if The Slumber Party Massacre was written by Rick Maxwell Brown and directed by Amais Holden Jones. Indeed, I doubt that any of these articles would exist at all if the genders of the screenwriter and director were flipped.

To be fair, there are some feminist overtones in this movie that have survived into the finished product, but the problem is that they are so half-baked and insubstantial that they are often contradicted by the movie they’re folded into. Take for instance the killer’s climactic confession to Trish: “I love you. Takes a lot of love for a person to do this. You know you want it. You’ll love it.” This is obviously the logic of a rapist and we are supposed to see his murdering of girls as an allegory for a man raping women. Yet, this metaphor doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you remember that the killer spends nearly as much time murdering boys and playing with their corpses as he does with the girls.

The other obvious feminist symbolism is the massive gas-powered drill/phallus the killer lugs around with him. It’s amusing to watch so many reviewers dislocate their shoulders patting themselves on the back for noticing the obvious sexual symbolism, yet once again it suffers from the fact that Russ Throne is constantly ramming his drill/penis into men. Are we supposed to read this as a condemnation of bisexual/pansexual predators? I know that commentators are keen to simply ignore all the male deaths in horror films and pretend that women are the only ones who have bad things happen to them in the genre, but not only do a great number of men die in slasher movies, a great number of men die in this particular slasher movie (five men to six women for those keeping score at home).

These problems could have been resolved easily enough. The easiest way would be to simply remove the male characters altogether and have Russ Thorne simply kill women for the entire film. It’s not like the guys provide much aside from some half-hearted attempt at comic relief. The filmmakers could have also been corrected this issue more interestingly by having Russ rely on another method aside from his drill/penis to dispatch the male victims. We could see him gleefully slaughtering the girls and only reluctantly killing men out of necessity, plainly uncomfortable with the idea of handling a dead male body in the same way a straight man would be uncomfortable handling another man’s penis. The concept is interesting and no doubt a solid slasher could be made from this idea. Too bad that both the script and the film that was made from it are too lazy to put in a tiny bit of consideration. As a result, the metaphor of sexual violence is garbled beyond all recognition and doesn’t say what the filmmakers seem to think it says.

Now that we’ve poked enough fun at the willfully ignorant, the genuine retards, and the certifiably insane commentators writing about this film, let's pause for a moment to consider The Slumber Party Massacre as a film in its own right. After a bit of reflection, it’s obvious that The Slumber Party Massacre is not a charmless movie. It has plenty of gore and boobs, which already elevates it over the PG-13 dreck that constitutes the bulk of the modern slasher subgenre. But more importantly, it has a delightful wrong-headedness to it, as its director and producer drag the original screenplay in a vastly different direction than what the screenwriter originally intended.

Most interestingly is the way that Jones and Corman left at least some of Brown’s jokes in the film seemingly unaltered while simultaneously switching the overall tone of the film from a parody to a traditional slasher. As a result, we have moments of humor that are wildly out of place with the rest of the film. Most notably is the scene where Jackie, having just found the pizza delivery guy with his eyes dug out of his skull, decides that she’s still hungry so she moves the dead man’s hand off the pizza box and goes for a slice. This is a scene that belongs in a horror-comedy, but aside from this and few other instances, The Slumber Party Massacre has no jokes.

Still, credit where credit is due. Jones’ previous profession shines through with her directorial debut; she edited the hell out of this movie. Where most slashers from the epoch stretch themselves out to feature-length, whether they need to or not, The Slumber Party Massacre is a lean 76 minutes. I wish more shitty horror movies dared to be this short, then at least I could get out of the theater faster or better yet have time to watch a good movie as part of a double feature.

On the whole, this has been a rather negative review, and I know what you’re thinking: “That S.C., he’s just a misogynist that hates women and is threatened by female directors moving into his beloved horror genre. Just look at his reviews of Charlie's Angels (2019) and The Love Witch (2016)! He’s probably an incel with a small penis.” To preempt this argument though I won’t prattle on about how much I respect women, or how it’s unlikely that I’m an incel since I’m married, or even how it’s actually only slightly smaller than average for a man of my ethnic group. Instead, I’ll just ask you to wait for the forthcoming review of Slumber Party Massacre II (1987), the sequel to today’s film which is also directed by a woman and is a legitimately great, albeit somewhat derivative, horror movie. Indeed, it’s a shame that the commentariat is so busy trying to redeem the mediocre original when the sequel is so fucking good.