The Slumber Party Massacre

MOVIE #1,193 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 10.15.23 50 MOVIES IN 32 DAYS! Part of me wants to write a single review for this very middling 80s horror trilogy, but I am going to push aside that lazy impulse because there's at least a few points to be made about each individual movie (none of which I recommend watching). The saddest fact here is how the original idea got massively mangled by producers. This series is still notable for being written and directed entirely by women filmmakers. The original, written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown, was intended to be a parody of the slasher genre. But the finished product has almost no satirical touches at all. So were left with is a stock horror film that actually seems to lean harder into the 'male gaze' problem than many of its contemporaries.

You could say that the very fact that a woman is behind the character is enough to work counter to that, but I'm not buying it. The movie is what the movie is: 80 minutes of T&A-heavy, generic gore that is instantly forgettable.

So the most interesting thing about The Slumber Party Massacre (and the whole trilogy to a lesser degree) is the question of "What if?" There are perhaps a few satirical elements from the original script that pop up (though I am hypothesizing here): the fact that the killer is just an average-looking white dude whose identity is never concealed, and an odd subplot where the girls painfully try to recall what players scored the runs in a baseball game the night before (?!), among them. (To the latter: it seems as if having the female victims so meticulously concerned about sports statistics is a metaphor for the kill-count obsessed — typically male — horror fanatic. But it’s, at best, a strained and misplaced thread, and, at worst, totally incomprehensible.)

For nearly the entirety of the thankfully short run-time it follows the very simple formula of: fake-out jump scare / tiddy / drill kill / awkward dialogue… rinse, wash, repeat. It’s wholly unoriginal and bland, and basically interchangeable with several other, far less infamous genre pictures of the era. And trying to reappraise this as a feminist work feels like a fool’s errand.

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The Slumber Party Massacre (also known as The Slumber Party Murders in the United Kingdom) is a 1982 American slasher film directed by Amy Holden Jones and written by Rita Mae Brown. It is the first installment in the Slumber Party Massacre series, and stars Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, and Michael Villella. The film follows a high school senior who gathers her friends for a slumber party, unaware that an escaped power drill-wielding killer is loose in the neighborhood. It was released on September 10, 1982.