‘You know how girls love to scream...’
After the huge success of Black Christmas, Halloween and Friday the 13th, there was a huge explosion of slasher movies. My Bloody Valentine, Sleepaway Camp, Maniac Cop – the list is endless. Many of these titles have faded into obscurity. You don’t see many references to Prom Night or Terror Train anymore. And Slumber Party Massacre is one of many from the era that hasn’t stood the test of time. And yet…
Trish Devereaux (Michelle Michaels) is a normal ’80s high school girl in a slasher movie. She looks at least 25-years-old. She’s constantly naked. She makes terrible, inexplicable decisions. She’s basically exactly the kind of horror film protagonist that Randy Meeks would wax lyrical about in Scream. Across the road from Trish lives Valerie (Robin Stille) – the new girl in town who the other girls dislike because she’s pretty and good at basketball. When escaped lunatic Russ Thorn (Michael Villella) starts murdering people with his incredibly phallic drill, Trish and Valerie are caught in his crosshairs.
A typical ’80s slasher movie on the face of it then, but there are a number of intriguing factors behind the camera that make Slumber Party Massacre worth watching. The first is that both the writer (Rita Mae Brown) and the director (Amy Holden Jones) were women, something utterly unheard of in that genre at that time. Mae Brown’s screenplay started life as a feminist satire of slasher movies, but not much of that remained on screen by final cut. This is largely down to the intervention of legendary B movie producer Roger Corman who apparently kept on insisting on more nudity and more death. Corman was certainly a man who knew his audience. Lastly, there is the tragic suicide of co-star Robin Stille at the age of 34 – something that stemmed largely from her inability to land major acting roles following the critical dismissal of this film (her appearance in the 1988 ‘classic’ Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama presumably did her no favours either).
The film itself is mildly entertaining and mercifully short at just 77 minutes. There are some inventive death scenes, and the duelling Final Girls concept is a solid one, but this is essentially slasher-by-numbers fare for horror completists only (of which I am very much one). One for the horror nerds to enjoy and literally nobody else.