The first instalment of the Slumber Party Massacre is a film famous as much for its storied production as it is for the final film.
Initially conceived as a parody by feminist author and civil rights campaigner Rita Mae Brown, the film was ultimately financed by exploitation maestro Roger Corman, a man whose ‘bung some topless girls in it’ attitude to making his money back leads popular consensus to dismiss the film as the product of a bizarre marriage that ultimately serves to nullify the film’s best intentions.
You have to say, watching the film again, that they popular consensus is pretty dead on. The film clearly has the bones of parody in it, skewering the slasher genre’s punishment of female sexuality, the killer’s ludicrously phallic drill acting as a deliberately over-ripe metaphor, and just enough silliness to see where it was coming from. But the film too often slips into an un-ironic version of what it is trying to mock, not allowed to commit to itself, too often upended by being dragged into a straightforward and ultimately pretty lacklustre take on the genre.
You’re faced with essentially the same bare-bones plot: teenager girls plan a party (this time at an out of town condo), then a murderer with a drill has the gall to waddle along and spoil things; but all nods to realism are stripped away, including a couple of post-Nightmare On Elm Street dream sequences. It is also, inexplicably, a ’50s themed musical, the girls are in a garage band, and the killer this time is a greaser whose murderous drill is also a guitar.
It doesn’t work all that well. It sounds a lot more feasibly fun on paper than it turns out, mainly due to the painfully irritating, all-singing, all-dancing killer who makes the film’s latter stages pretty unbearable. If you are to eschew horror for outright comedy, you really need to come with a funnier script than they had, and instead it ends up closer to one of those novelty Edinburgh shows that make you think drama schools could do with being a little bit more toxic.That said, there’s something far stranger going on in the film that I just can’t shake. In its early stages, before it fully commits to full Halloween / Rocky Horror / Grease mode, it has an uncanny wrongness that really sets it apart. It has an ’80s aesthetic that feels comically of its times, its setting a child’s drawing of American suburbia, its characters an AI approximation of Reaganite heartthrobs. It all just feels subtly wrong, like an accidental forebear to Brian Yuzna’s Society.
It makes you think of that old thing about Orson Welles only being able to make Citizen Kane when he did because he didn’t really know what he was doing, and as such didn’t know what he couldn’t do. There’s something oddly similar happening here.First-time director Deborah Brock seems to have dived head first into parody without having nailed some of the film-making basics that are taken for granted. Shot/reverse shots don’t quite match up, the music all sounds like Poundland recreations of ’50s classics, leaving it oddly close to David Lynch in its sense of ‘just off-ness’. It is totally inept, but completely captivating, and becomes infinitely less interesting as the film wears on and becomes, horror of horrors, consummate.
Slumber Party Massacre II is a failure on all its own terms, but despite itself becomes infinitely stranger once you free yourself of what anyone involved is actually trying to do. It becomes the direct inverse of it is predecessor, a film that is trying to do something interesting, but is being upturned by the circumstances of its creation.Both films in their strange way make for ultimately unsuccessful, but deeply interesting representations of their era of horror.
-Joe Creely-
