SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE – amy jones – 2.5 / 10

This film fits the slasher movie blueprint to a 't,' almost as if it were constructed with that as the goal.  To wit: there’s some tragic event in the past that comes back to haunt a bunch of young women left all alone with no one in authority.  And then they’re hunted by a madman and picked off one by one.  Whatever merit there is in being able to paint within the lines, this film achieves it.

 
But it’s the small details that Jones and Co. fail at completely.  The killer, for instance, wears no mask or anything at all creepy or disturbing.  In fact, the audience gets to see his face almost immediately.  And without that element of mystery, there’s no surprise in finding out who the killer is, only in finding out why he kills.  But, really, who cares about that?  Then, of course, the film commits the ultimate sin of having more false scares than legitimate ones.  Personally, I hate false scares altogether, but if you must have them, they really shouldn’t outnumber the real scares.

That’s not to say that the film is completely without merit.  The killer in the film kills people with a huge drill (like multiple feet long).  And every female character in the film gets naked at least once.  That being the case, it’s impossible not to read the drill as a phallic symbol and the murders as rapes by steel.  The killer’s even ‘castrated’ in the end when his drill bit is chopped in half.

Unfortunately, that sort of subtextual meaning dates back to Psycho and has been done to death in everything from Friday the 13th to The Last House on the Left.  So while Slumber Party Massacre earns points for at least attempting to be about something, it loses most of them for being about the same thing as twenty other better films.  Which leads me to conclude that the film’s minor classic status has a lot more to do with all the naked girls than anything else. 

Which is interesting considering the film is one of the rare slasher flicks to be directed by a woman (although, as I always say, women put a lot more naked women in their films than men do).  So maybe the whole thing’s a joke.  Maybe the cheesy dialogue and paint by numbers story is meant to be a criticism of the genre.  But it’s not nearly over the top enough for that.  It plays mostly as a straight slasher with the sexual overtones ramped way up.  At most that makes it a minor critique of the genre, a genre which is more or less always self parody anyway, so what’s the point of that?