Suffice it to say, the ladies behind The Slumber Party Massacre don't ape Carpenter's viewpoint: their women are sexually liberated, with most of them spending much of the film in nothing more than undergarments and what not.
John Carpenter has resisted the reading of Halloween that posits Michael Myers as a victim of sexual repression and whose butcher knife acts as a violent, phallic substitute instead, he considers the virginal Laurie Strode to be the one with the sexual hang-ups. While this isn’t as overt as the meta tomfoolery in Scream, there’s a sense that The Slumber Party Massacre is knowingly cliché at times.Īnd of course there’s the issue of a guy who’s primary murder weapon is uber-phallic, a point that rarely goes unnoticed throughout the film.
Another scene has Valerie watching a slasher flick (a bit from Joe Dante's Hollywood Boulevard) as an actual murder takes place right outside of her door. On the whole, the film feels a bit sillier and more self-aware than many of its contemporaries as well, what with all of the ridiculous jump scares (one stretch strings like three of them in a row) and the fits of oddball humor (my favorite is Thorn disguising himself as the pizza delivery man and cracking wise about how many folks he’s killed so far). It’s mostly confined to oddball moments, such as an egregious pan on a girl’s ass that’s so blatantly obvious and pointless that it must be calling out the genre’s tendency to male gaze. Maybe it’s just the fallacy of intent whispering into my ear, but there’s an occasional whiff of the film Brown initially wrote. And, in between them, a dude that really enjoys impaling unwitting victims with a power drill for no apparent reason (you might consider this an attempt to ape the enigma of Michael Myers, but I reckon it’s because explaining a motive would take time, which is not a luxury when you’ve got a dozen folks to drill holes into).Īll of the slashing arrives without fail-and not without an undercurrent of subversion. Val spurns the request after overhearing a catty conversation between Trish’s friends and opts to spend the night at home with her sister, so you’ve got a pack of alpha girls and literally the girl next door (Val ends up becoming more of a protagonist, if the film can really be considered to have one). At first, she’s at least the nice girl of her group since she goes out of her way to invite Valerie (Robin Stille), the new awkward new girl at school who also moved in next door. Characterization is minimal, as Trish seems like a default protagonist simply because she’s the one who throws the party. Slashers don’t come more streamlined than this one: not only does it dispense with any mystery by revealing the killer right up front, but it also gets right down to business by gratuitously offing a couple of victims post-haste.
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