SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
1/2
Not quite as good as THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE but not quite as awful as SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT, SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE is still toward the bottom of the barrel of slasher entertainment. It's the one with the driller killer, a guy who was convicted of killing five people and has just broken out of jail, on the same night some debs are planning a slumber party that will be "just like old times." It's going to be just like old times for the driller killer too, whose first victim is a pretty phone repairman, who gets it after turning down a couple shaggy-haired dorks.
The shaggy-haired dorks figure prominently in the plot (if you can call it that) of SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE as they peek in the window of the girls at their slumber party. These are the braless girls who change their shirts in the middle of the night with the shades up for no reason: Needless Boob Shot #2. The first one comes earlier in the movie, as the girls shower after gym class, after which the killer sticks around to claim his second victim with the drill again. After the fourth or fifth drilling, it gets way too tedious.
Back at the slumber party, we get a couple really stupid scares when a man sneaks down the stairs, only to reveal himself as the next-door neighbor, checking in on the girls. This same guy lurks in the garage later as one of the girls comes out to make sure it's closed (just one of many hardly-believable contrivances to get people out of the house) and of course the girl doesn't even wonder why the overly-concerned neighbor is hiding in her garage. By the time the nosy neighbor becomes the third victim, we're more than ready for him to pull into that great garage in the sky.
The movie progresses more slowly than most horror movies (despite only lasting 77 minutes), with supposed scares (the cat jumps out of the closet, etc.) and non-gory murders at all the usual places, while two sisters left home alone next door wonder why the lights have gone out in the next house and there are girls screaming. The people in this movie are far less intelligent than the usual slasher movie characters; one boy wears a shirt with the number ten emblazoned across his chest and you wonder why he'd advertise his I.Q. like that.
I don't have to tell you to stay away from SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, a movie which induces slumber for most of its viewers. Although its writer and director were both women, the female characters are never anything more than giggling idiots who don't even think to take the drill away from the killer after knocking him down. The killer himself is a fool with no motivation to be hacking up a bunch of teenagers, his only dialogue coming at the end, when he starts telling the remaining victims, "I love you," over and over. But no one has ever said that about this movie.
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