BITE-SIZED REVIEW: The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Jones, 1982)

Alone for the weekend, teenager Trish (Michelle Michaels) invites her friends over for a slumber party. What they don't know is that serial murderer Russ Thorne (Michael Villella) is in the neighbourhood, looking to increase his bodycount...

There is nothing subtle about this movie. If you have seen the poster, you know exactly what it is.

A latecomer to the first slasher wave, The Slumber Party Massacre has an interesting pedigree - produced by Roger Corman, the movie was written by feminist academic Rita Mae Brown and directed by former editor Amy Jones, who would go on to direct the drama Love Letters with former scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis

I watched this movie about a decade ago, after reading Corman's autobiography How I Made a 100 Movies in Hollywood and never lost a Dime. Corman is famous for giving budding filmmakers opportunities, and one of the stories he related was about this movie - editor Amy Jones was keen to get a shot directing and so she put together a skeleton crew and shot the first 10 minutes of the movie without Corman realising it. When she presented the completed footage to the producer, he was so impressed he gave her the budget to finish the rest of the movie.


The book was filled with stories like this, with Corman offering tips and examples of how to get a genre picture made for very little money. At the time I read Corman's book, I was studying film production, and was hungry for stories like Jones's.






While I recognise its flaws, I have always had a fondness for this movie. It's working from a familiar template, but because it is so small in scope, and it is not as technically strong as something like Halloween, there was something weirdly aspirational about it.  

If you are looking for an introduction to the basic tenets of the teen horror movie, watching only the best movies won't get you that far. You can learn something from watching ideas executed brilliantly (Halloween), but I guarantee you will learn more from watching a movie like Slumber Party Massacre, where the mechanics of these movies are exposed. Not only is the shakiness of the movie's use of familiar clichés and formal conventions part of its charm, SPM serves as a great example of how these things are supposed to work.


Structurally, SPM is a re-run of Halloween - an evil killer escapes from prison to continue killing people and stumbles into a group of randy teenagers.


Now from what I have gathered, Rita Mae Brown's script was intended as a comedy, but the filmmakers did not get the satirical bent and turned it into a cookie cutter slasher movie. There are a couple of jokes which make it through - the phallic symbolism of the killer's drill; the creepy-but-well-intentioned neighbour; the zodiac signs in the newspaper. My personal favourite is the reveal (to the audience) of a body in the fridge, that the rest of the cast remain completely oblivious of.
I chalk it up to Brown and Jones that the movie does not really echo the implications of the poster. There is only one scene of brief nudity, and the violence is underplayed (probably due to the low budget).
The acting by the unknown cast is a bit wooden, although the core group of slumber paty-ers(?) have an easy rapport that adds a couple notes of humanity that they lack by themselves. There is a long, slightly dull subplot involving a new girl (Robin Stille) in the neighbourhood who has been ostracised from the group at school, and winds up coming to the rescue at the end. With a more sure hand at the directing tiller, and a more experienced cast, The Slumber Party Massacre might have been a dry run for Scream. As is, it is a generic slasher.


But if you take it as an instruction manual on how to do a genre film on the cheap, The Slumber Party Massacre gains another layer of entertainment value. It features a clear concept, a small cast, and a few key locations. And as a rip-off of a better-known movie, it offers a good primer in how to pull off low budget thrills. It's far from perfect, but in its imperfection, The Slumber Party Massacre brings visibility to the human endeavour of trying to scare an audience.