The Slumber Party Massacre is - hey! Another schlocky early-80s slasher movie! (Pure coincidence, I just bought a bunch of Shout Factory DVDs at the beginning of October because they had a sale.) It stars Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, Michael Villella, Jennifer Meyers, Debra Deliso, Pamela Roylance, Rigg Kennedy, Gina Mari, Joseph Alan Johnson, and David Milbern.
Very, very simple premise: A bunch of girls have a slumber party. There's an escaped serial killer named Russ Thorn (Villella) on the loose, who evidently has no better motive that "kill as many people as possible." He starts off with a phone repairwoman (Jean Vargas) and steals the frankly impractically long power drill from her van, and uses that as his primary weapon. He focuses on the girls having a slumber party. Trish (Michaels), the girl hosting the party whilst her folks are away means it to be all girls (like the good old days), but her horny friend Diane (Mari) invites her boyfriend (Jim Reid Boyce) along, and a couple of the girls' classmates, Neil (Johnson) and Jeff (Milbern) show up to tease them.
Meanwhile, Trish had invite the athletic new girl Valerie (Stille), but she didn't really feel welcome so stays home with her little sister Courtney (Meyers). As such, the action in the movie cuts between the two sisters hanging out, talking about going to the party (Courtney is, shall we say, starved for social interaction), and the girls at the party getting nekkid in full view of an open window (you know, as one does) while Neil and Jeff watch and giggle and Russ hides in the bushes waiting to drill someone to death.
And drill he does! It really is a massacre; Russ racks up a pretty impressive body count, considering the lack of isolation like we have in camp-based slashers. Trish, Val, and Courtney manage to kill Russ and survive, but basically every other character we meet gets drilled.
I knew this movie existed for a long time, but what I knew about it was the cover: The killer standing over three scantily dressed girls with a big ol' power drill hanging pensily down in front of him. And when I finally did see it some years back, yeah, that metaphor is really as overt as you'd think. But then I learned that the movie was written by Rita Mae Brown (the author of Rubyfruit Jungle) and directed by Amy Jones (who was just starting her film career at the time, but would go on to write and direct other films of varying quality - as a side note, she wrote The Relic, which has since become a favorite of mine). The history of the movie is interesting, because she was working with Roger Corman at the time, and so the early scene with the girls showering was basically her getting the nudity out of the way (there's more later, but it's not quite as gratuitous? No, I guess it is). My point is just that if Amy Jones had directed this script without any constraints from Corman, it might have been interesting, but would it be the gloriously schlocky slasher it became? Who can say.
The movie suffers from some of the same issues a lot of slashers do; to wit, the girls are clearly older than their characters are meant to be (with the possible exception of Courtney, who looks about right; I have no idea how old the actress is and this was apparently her only credit, so it's not like she has a wiki page). I actually had trouble telling the girls' basketball coach (Roylance) apart from the girls themselves in the early scenes. In that vein, a little diversity would have gone a long way. The characters are pretty interchangeable and they don't get a lot of detail to differentiate themselves, and they're almost all white and brunette.
But there are some interesting choices, too. The killer doesn't have much motivation, but he's never hidden or masked. He's just...this guy. He's a short, skinny, bug-eyed fucker who likes killing people (and while he mostly kills women, that really just seems to be what's on the menu because he kills any guys he comes across, too). The actor (the late Michael Villella) applied some Strasbergian method acting techniques to developing his motivation and performance, and while I personally never vibed with that method, damn if it doesn't work - Russ Thorn is probably the most distinct character in the movie.
We're done with slashers for a little while now (just got a bunch of new DVDs from Half-Price Books last night), but I'm finding I'm really enjoying the early-80s stuff, so I might need to hunt down a few more.
My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: High
Next up: Blood Simple
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