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What do you get when you cross Roger Corman's B-movie exploitation ethos with a feminist screenwriter and a first-time director screwing with the slasher genre? You bet your bit it's THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE in 1982, the hit satire/sexploitation twist on genre-defining watershed films like HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH before it, branded by Corman's trademark low-budget and high-concept ambitions. Just in time for Halloween horror viewing, Shout! Factory has released THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE Collection The original MASSACRE lives on largely due to its skewed (and skewered) reputation as the first "feminist slasher movie" which is a highly debatable point when these films are viewed a couple decades later, but it was a good marketing hook for its time which was largely the point. The original script 'Don't Open the Door', penned by feminist author Rita Mae Brown, intended to send up the slasher genre by swapping gender roles between the terrified teen girls and their mindlessly macho boyfriends. With the boys relegated to easily killed-off sidebar characters, the girls fight off the power drill-wielding maniac with a vengeance to varying degrees of success and undress. Genre rule-bending aside, the simplistic formula sold tickets: add equal parts smart girls, stupid boys, silly nude scenes and a sadistic stalker, and simmer for about 80 minutes, then laugh all the way to the bank. Its two sequels existed to deliver more of the same, reflecting the then-current contexts of slasher film evolution, dressed up once again in flimsy nighties and tempting teddies. None of the plot and little of the killer's terror was meant to be taken seriously by audiences, who gladly obliged, embracing the tongue-in-cheek take on slasher cinema to enjoy titillating T&A and over-the-top gruesome kills as Corman does best. Viewers' enjoyment of THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE Collection depends on duplicating that pact when spinning up these DVDs: this content is intended for slightly immature audiences seeking a few cheap thrills and nothing more, and these three Corman Cult Classics deliver exactly that. The relentless series of knock-offs which followed only attest to an audience willing to accept those terms and pay up to enjoy the mindless mayhem which ensues. Think of this trio as Halloween mind candy for horror fans: little intellectual nutrition and a lot of empty calories to satisfy your silly cinema sweet tooth. The plots of quite superfluous here, but their review merits a quick recap if only to distinguish one title from another: director Amy Jones' original THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982) has Trish (Michelle Michaels) throwing a slumber party for her schoolmates, unwittingly providing a target-rich environment of targets for the escaped mental patient/psycho killer's overcompensating power drill. In the bonus material interview, Jones still winces at the obligatory nude scenes Corman forced upon the film, and such directorial distaste shows in such erotically void moments which nearly blare "sexploitation" across the screen. A dubious argument also exists that Brown's script and Jones' film is somehow a feminist parody of the slasher genre, since its heroines aren't particularly heroic in their desperate fights for survival, nor are they particularly clever compared to their truly brainless male teen counterparts — it's a distinction rather like being proclaimed the smartest idiot in the village. Laurie Strode these girls are not, nor do their actions to defeat (or die under the drill of) the maniac make them feminist in the political/cultural sense of the terms. Making the boys die meaningless, peripheral deaths (as females so often did in the genre) doesn't automatically mold the girl leads into empowered heroines by default, they need to be written and acted that way. The advantage of hindsight reveals several truly feminist-styled heroines in horror films, and these bra strapped babes hardly qualify. Not that the film's devoted cult audience cares one whit about this distinction, they just dig watching girls beat up their tormenting drill destructor, played to bizarrely strange success by Michael Villella. But when formulas work, why fix what isn't broken when a low budget repolishing of the plot will draw ticket sales? Corman followed up with SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II in 1987, written and directed by Deborah Brock and starring Crystal Bernard as the young sister survivor of the first massacre. Haunted by nightmares of the killer's return (inexplicably as an entirely different character this time), and traumatized by her older sister's commitment to a mental hospital, Courtney seeks an escape from her troubles by spending a weekend with her girlfriend bandmates at a borrowed condo. Stupid boyfriends tag along to spoil the all-girl weekend, but the "reincarnated" driller killer really steals the show as a John Travolta-like slick-haired rocker with a power drill guitar, striking chords of terror in them all. Courtney's nightmares become real as the driller killer manifests to claim their lives one by one while living his own bloody music video. The film is a regurgitation of 1980s pop culture influences and trends, mixing and mismatching genre rules inspired by other franchises with little regard for anything but regular appearances of boobs and blood. Bernard plays the terrified prey as convincingly as the often nonsensical script allows, while rockabilly driller Atanas Ilitch infuses the vacant villain role with a wacky over-the-top performance going for sheer style points. The ending — one dares not call it a climax in any sense of the word — remains strangely unsatisfying on all fronts: the villain's 'demise' is the most boring death of all, and the heroine's 'triumph' is too hollow even for a pyrrhic victory for irony sake. The series attempted to reverse gears a bit in 1990 with SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE III, penned by Catherine Cyran and directed by Sally Mattison. Once again a psycho stalker menaces a group of teen girls gathered for a parent-free slumber party weekend disrupted by their moronic boyfriends, only to have this scare tactic backfire on them all as a new drill-down killer preys upon the group. The supposed twist on the formula here is turning the slasher pic into a who-done-it mystery, though this game is so clumsily handled and telegraphed that the killer's identity offers little surprise value. Considerably less fun and satirical in tone to its predecessors, MASSACRE III gets rather mean at points and the overriding tone of rape and sexual abuse effectively kills the "joy" of a slasher send-up series. While more prolonged in terror (bordering on torture for its time), the kills aren't particularly imaginative, save perhaps for the electrocution by vibrator murder which, ironically, is the tamest in the film. This second sequel — understandably the killer of the MASSACRE franchise — plays like a slasher parody made by filmmakers who dislike either aspect of the project, declaring the drill-kill bit dead during the film instead of sending it off into film history with one last hurrah. The series which was never meant to be taken seriously apparently got taken too seriously by Cyran and Mattison, draining the charge from this Corman franchise to zero. DVD specs and bonus features in THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE Collection include:
The two new film transfers hold up well considering the source materials' age, though some grit, scratches and defects persist which only preserve the low-budget, grindhouse-style exhibition of these titles, reminiscent of their heydays on VHS but benefitting from DVD presentation. The audio tracks are Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo in English across the board as expected and merited, again keeping true to their meager origins. All three MASSACRES are rated R for the usual suspects of nudity, sexual situations, violence, gore and perhaps their comically outdated fashion and hair styles as well. As expected, Shout! Factory's Roger Corman Cult Classics release of THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE Collection offers fans and fanatics their best available versions of these three films, widely unavailable and out of print for roughly a decade. The keyword is Corman, and for better or worse, this film franchise offers exactly what their titles imply and their posters show off: mediocre frights and ample doses of flesh — and indeed, that's basically all the franchise's cult audience expects or wants. In those narrow terms, the Massacres are goofy genre successes and this DVD is a most welcome addition to their spooky season movie watching list. FilmEdge happily acknowledges that this 2-disc set reaches that low-set bar of expectation, but if you haven't acquired a taste for such schlocky Corman fare (we've liked others in his cult quiver), you may want to crash another party this Halloween.
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