Cardboard Science: I'm Looking Through You

Year: 1963
Director: Roger Corman
Cast: Ray Milland, Diana Van der Vlis, Harold J. Stone
Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes

Happy October, everybody! It's time for the 12th Annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue. For those who are new here, it's the time of year when I assign Hunter three 1980s slashers from my Census Bloodbath project to review. Keep an eye out for those. In exchange, he assigns me three of his Cardboard Science titles, which are science fiction movies from the 1950s (well, mostly the 1950s - his timeline is not quite so strict as mine).

Notice that I did say three movies! For the past couple years, I've only had the bandwidth to do one title in October, but this time I was able to jump pack into the pool with both feet and return to the traditional trio of reviews, which I'll be publishing throughout the month! Thankfully, that pool has been nice and warm and comfortable, because this year, Hunter has been especially nice by assigning three titles with huge names of the genre attached. 

We're gonna kick off with one of the biggest. You see, X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes was directed by the late, great Roger Corman. Corman is the perfect lynchpin for any year's Switcheroo, because - in addition to helming titles under the Cardboard Science purview like It Conquered the World - he went on to produce a number of Census Bloodbath movies as well, including Stripped to Kill, The Slumber Party Massacre, Sorority House Massacre, and Mountaintop Motel Massacre. 

What can I say, the man loved a massacre.

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes follows Dr. James Xavier (Oscar winner Ray Milland; you know, the guy from Frogs!), who experiments with eye drops that will allow him to see a broader spectrum of light than any person has ever seen before. Dr. Sam Brant (Harold J. Stone) has grave misgivings about this, but helps him anyway. Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diana Van der Vlis), who represents the foundation that is funding Xavier's research, has less grave misgivings, but mostly because she has the hots for him.

Anyway, his experiment gives him X-Ray vision, but only for temporary periods. However, his continued use of the drops leads to permanent, compounded intensity of his X-Ray vision, to the point that he can see through the fabric of the universe into the Lovecraftian madness at its center. Things don't go all that well for him. 

Oh, and along the way he works at a carnival briefly because... well, why not, I guess.

So, I do love a time capsule, and X certainly provides on that front. Even though it's a fairly tried-and-true sci-fi horror story about a scientist's hubris destroying his life that boasts a screenplay that could have been written a good 10 years earlier, its aesthetic trappings allow you to carbon date it to the exact second it was shot, which is one of the great things about many Roger Corman movies.

Largely, this is evidenced in the overall look of the movie, which is cozy and colorful, with great big splashes of that burgundy red that we used to have in such abundance back when movies had saturated color schemes. But there are some sequences that are totally far out, including the big purple spiral swirling behind the opening credits and the hyper-mod party where everyone does that absurdly gyratey 1960s dance that everyone seemed to innately know how to do back then, where you swing your little T-Rex arms around too rapidly for the human eye to process.

Unfortunately, in spite of these manifold 1960s delights, there really just is no getting around that story. It starts off fine, at least. It cuts right to the chase, which I appreciate, to the point that Ray Milland is giving himself X-Ray vision by the time we hit the 12 minute mark. And about 3 of those minutes were credits.

However, once it gets cracking, the pacing immediately goes slack and the movie just sort of meanders around for an hour and change until it's had enough of itself. It has no direction whatsoever, and I wish it had just chosen a path. If it was hornier, it would have been camp fun. If it made the lead into more of a Bond villain, it would have been camp fun. If it was more cosmic, it might have been legitimately great.

More of this, please and thank you.

However, it just kind of floats around like a detached retina. There are several clear attempts to mold the story into some genre or other, but they never stick. It's a romance sometimes, and a sci-fi movie other times. Then it's a horror movie and eventually even an action movie. Like, it literally ends on a car chase.

It's perhaps at its best when it's a horror movie, because that's the register that Ray Milland's plummy, perfect performance is channeled in the most exciting way. I could watch him waxing poetic about the skeleton of a city or his unwanted ability to see through his own eyelids all day. If it was purely a character study giving Milland free reign, it might have been an all-out masterpiece.

It's just too distracted to ever really get there. Yes, some of the moments that the movie vomits up on screen are quite good. I do like when the movie gets cute with his X-Ray vision (particularly in a scene where he's being given an eye test, or the part where he sees everybody at the party dancing naked). And he briefly has a fabulous scene partner in Don Rickles as a crooked carnival barker (Rickles laces a bit of poison around his showman's charisma that is quite compelling).

But ultimately, the sum of X's parts swings the wrong direction, especially because some of those parts are, say, the scene where Xavier is diagnosing a sick little girl by X-Ray visioning through her clothes and only then through her skin. And then his colleague comes in and comments about how pretty the little girl is and Xavier agrees and we're meant to be heartwarmed or something. Let's just say that not everything about a time capsule is worth the effort of digging it up.

Oh, also, I unequivocally hate the way his X-ray powers actually look onscreen. The shots that are filmed in what I've dubbed "eyeball-vision" are surrounded by this blood red frame that's meant to mimic the shape of an eye. Never mind the issue that you don't see your own eye sockets when you're looking out of them. You've got to let a genre movie do its thing. But it's just an ugly visual, and we get so damn much of it. Boo.

Anyway, it's so good to be back! Long live Cardboard Science!

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*So in the scene where he can see everybody at the party dancing naked, including being able to see through their shoes, how come everybody's feet are touching the floor instead of floating a couple centimeters above- you know what, nevermind.
*I would also like to take issue with Xavier's "X-Ray vision" while driving into Vegas, which is literally the same collage of neon signs that any movie with a Vegas sequence does, but seen through a distorted filter.
*I've been really trying not to nitpick a silly Roger Corman movie, I promise, but it's baffling how Xavier is able to see the blackjack cards using his X-Ray vision. It would canonically just show him the back of the next card in the deck. Make it make sense!

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*The scene where Ray Milland lights a cigarette using a Bunsen burner might be the most 1960s thing I've ever seen, and I'm including that party sequence.
*When Dr. Xavier pushes Sam out the window in a fit of pique (happens to the best of us), Dr. Fairfax urges him to escape, lest he be accused of murder. She, however, stays put in the room where a man was just murdered, because I guess the police would never suspect a woman of having the upper body strength to pull off such a crime.
*As he begins his winning streak in Vegas, Xavier hands Fairfax a coin and she protests "I don't gamble!" as if it would somehow be a moral failing to put his coin into the machine so he can try and win some money. Some people need to take a chill pill.

Sensawunda:

*I shall not embarrass myself by revealing how long it took me to notice that Dr. Xavier's name begins with... an X!
*By far the best scene in the movie is when Roger Corman stalwart Dick Miller and his Little Shop of Horrors co-star Jonathan Haze show up to heckle Dr. Xavier when he's working at the carnival.
*The movie starts on a 37-second still frame of a bloody eyeball with music playing behind it, which was actually effectively unsettling, but mostly because I was worried I had broken my TV.

TL;DR: X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes is a charming movie, but it's ultimately pretty empty.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1541

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture 

2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

2023: Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)
2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

2025: X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) The Spider (1958) The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

2025: Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988) Visiting Hours (1982)

Census Bloodbath: Naked And Afraid

Year: 1987

Director: Katt Shea

Cast: Kay Lenz, Greg Evigan, Norman Fell 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Our slasher project Census Bloodbath has taken a bit of a backseat recently, especially thanks to the insane number of marathons I was running in October. But what possible better fit could there be for diving right back into the heart of the 80's slasher movement than Stripped to Kill? Birthed from the churning sack of tricks at Roger Corman's studio, it's a nasty sleazy exploitation movie that makes zero effort to hide its own intentions. That beautiful poster says it all. 

But included in that "all" is the single most important element that makes Stripped to Kill interesting. It was directed and co-written by a woman. That's right, Katt Shea, the auteur behind Poison Ivy and The Rage: Carrie 2 got her start as a surprising number of women in the industry did, from the buckets of slime at Corman's place (as much as you might distrust Roger Corman's quality control, he sure gave a hell of a lot of people chances that wouldn't have gotten them otherwise).

Thanks?

In Stripped to Kill, you guessed it, a murderer be killin' strippers. Detective Cody Sheenan (Kay Lenz) must go undercover at the Rock Bottom strip club, to the wolfish delight of her partner, Heineman (Greg Evigan, of My Two Dads, who is the most 80's of hunks and never not dressed like Kiefer Sutherland in The Lost Boys). Between lengthy stripping numbers that rival the sheer mass of aerobics exercise stock footage in Killer Workout, they attempt to track down who exactly might be mowing down these poor working women.

It's certainly not their hair stylist, because there doesn't appear to be one within a ten mile radius.

As the story goes, Katt Shea was inspired to make this film after losing a bet with her husband (and co-writer) Andy Ruben, after which she was made to go to strip club. She was dreading it, but during the performance she had a revelation that for certain women, stripping was a completely valid form of artistic expression for certain women. She decided to make a movie that reflected that, and you know what? She certainly did. 

The plot of Stripped to Kill lurches randomly as you sit down every six minutes or so for a full striptease routine, a rhythm that was she was most likely contractually obligated to use by Corman & Co. The film still suffers as a narrative for this, but certainly not as much as it would if it had a male director. Shea presents some bold, exciting routines that catch the eye with more than just nudity, using costuming, sets, acrobatics, and avant-garde concepts in increasingly bizarre and captivating routines to show off just how versatile the act of stripping really is. It's a mini performance art project shoehorned into producer-mandated exploitation, and it's a sublime act of subversion.

Plus, Shea respecting these women as artists then extends to her respecting them as human beings, go figure. The characters are still pretty indistinguishable and not particularly fleshed out (look, there's only so much you can do in an 88 minute movie with 35 minutes of stripping), but their offstage dialogue and personality quirks are far from stereotypical. The film explores their motivations for stripping, their reactions to the way the men in the audience view them, and how they seek to support one another. It's like a season of GLOW, but with more nudity. One scene is - dare I say - even quite powerful. When the detective is dropped off by a coworker, Cody mentions that she's an incredible dancer, to which she replies "It's nice to hear that from a woman." She only hears compliments from men who want to manipulate her into sex, and hearing it from another woman is a validation of her art and worth. And I'm crying.

The character of Detective Cody is also extremely interesting. The more she learns about the world of Rock Bottom, the more she finds that there is truth and power in the act of stripping that she hasn't found anywhere else in her professional career. I wouldn't say this arc is completed because like most slashers the credits roll the millisecond the immediate conflict is resolved, but none of this would ever be found in a movie like this made by straight men, it just wouldn't happen. Especially in the 1980's.

Girl power!

All that said, I would still like to remind you that this is a crappy slasher movie. That's exactly the type of movie that I enjoy, so I personally wouldn't say it's a problem, but I don't want you to walk away thinking it's even Daytime Emmy material. The production quality is low, with murky cinematography married to muddy sound over a series of sets that - when they aren't in the club itself - always extravagantly fail to resemble the places they're supposed to be.

Take Detective Cody's apartment set. She walks in through some sort of atrium into a big empty concrete hangar with random tricycles and junk scattered around. Then she walks up an indoor metal staircase to the second floor, which has a couch and a kitchen setup, including a massive industrial oven just sitting on the counter. You know, an apartment!

It's a wonky movie, to be sure, from the chilling lack of extras in any club scene to the egregiously sinful original synthpop songs that blare from the soundtrack. Most of this adds a satisfying layer of camp, if you're into that (especially the third act Final Girl sequence, which involves about eighty unmotivated walls of flame bursting up in random alleys), but it's all a bit thin as an actual work of cinema. And there's no getting around the problematic killer reveal, which is [SPOILERS UNTIL THE END OF THIS PARAGRAPH] a bog-standard "crazed man in drag" play that makes absolutely no sense, though at least it gives us a chase sequence involving a beautiful Hawaiian twink with a killer smoky eye.

There is also some hilarity to be found in how much Kay Lenz commits to being a terrible dancer, as well as what is maybe the best disgruntled secretary character in the history of the motion picture. But Stripped to Kill is unfortunately exactly as thin a premise as the title promises. This certainly would have been bottom-of-the-barrel muck without Katt Shea, but given what it is, she can only raise it to the middle of the barrel. 

It's no masterpiece, then. But at least it's never a waste of time, and there's not a lot of this type of slasher I can say that about. 

Killer: [Eric (Pia Kamakahi)]

Final Girl: Detective Cody Sheenan (Kay Lenz)

Best Kill: None. The kills here are nasty and not particularly gory, they're certainly not the reason to watch, if there even is a strong one.

Sign of the Times: Literally everything Heineman ever wears, says, or does.

Or maybe the moment where a customer tries to tempt one of the strippers on a date with Dire Straits tickets.

Scariest Moment: Any time the women use the payphone in the hallway, they're approached by slobbering customers, so every scene involving a phone call highlights exactly how vulnerable they are.

Weirdest Moment: One of the strip acts involves a kabuki mask and arms reaching out from a giant spider web.

Champion Dialogue: "I did not spend a whole night talking about my penis. I am NOT obsessed."

Body Count: 6

1. Angel is pushed off a bridge and lit on fire.
2. Cinnamon is strung up with fishing wire. 
3. Margolin is killed offscreen. 
4. Spotlight Guy is shot.
5. Stripper is shot.
6. Eric is lit on fire. 

TL;DR: Stripped to Kill rises above its exploitation premise thanks to a female director who actually gives half a crap about the characters contained therein.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1323
Reviews In This Series
Stripped to Kill (Shea, 1987)

Cardboard Science: Roger That

Now that we’re firmly settled into our Amityville marathon, it’s time for that other October tradition: Popcorn Culture’s annual crossover with Hunter Allen at Kinemalogue! I’ve given him three more Census Bloodbath slashers to peruse, and in return I shall be covering another trio of 50’s sci-fi pictures for Cardboard Science!

Year: 1958

Director: Roger Corman

Cast: Peter Graves, Beverly Garland, Lee Van Cleef 

Run Time: 1 hour 11 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

Can you believe we’ve been doing this project for four years now and I’ve never been assigned a Roger Corman movie until now? I’m trying to get into the Cardboard Science undergraduate program after all, and Corman is a pre-requisite. The man has worn many hats (including shepherding a host of Poe films for AIP, starting the careers of Jack Nicholson, James Cameron, and Francis Ford Coppola, and more recently producing a slew of SyFy Channel originals), but the man who can shoot a film in five days with a script written on a napkin has rightfully earned his status as an icon of 50’s B-movies.

I’ve only spent time with Corman-as-director in 1960, having seen two of his films from that year: Little Shop of Horrors and House of Usher. And if you’re surprised he had two films come out in the same year, you’re not paying attention. But I digress. Let’s get to the topic at hand, my very first 50’s Corman film and one of his four pictures released in 1956 (it must have been a slow year): It Conquered the World.

And no, that’s not a headline describing the box office of September 2017.

The It in question is an alien being from Venus, who is holed up in a hot spring cave in that exact stretch of rocky, deserty wilderness that lies just outside every small town in America, according to 50’s B-movies. It has been in communication with Dr. Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef, of every spaghetti Western you’ve ever heard of), a physicist who has become a laughingstock thanks to his theories about extraterrestrials spying on planet Earth. Unfortunately he turns out to be right when a team led by Dr. Paul Nelson (Peter Graves of Airplane! and probably some other stuff) launches a satellite into space, prompting It to pay earth a little visit.

While It uses its eight mind-controlling devices (attached to flapping plastic bats) to take over the town leaders by removing their emotion and humanity, Paul runs around trying to save the world and Tom attempts to help It carry out its dastardly plan, believing that It is helping to create a more sable, rational world in which he will be a high-ranking member. Meanwhile, Tom’s wife Claire (Beverly Garland) tries everything she can to talk him into resisting It’s evil influence.

It Ruined Her Marriage

At first glance, It Conquered the World is very derivative of a lot of other sci-fi flicks. When It arrives, it causes all the machines in town to shut down, á là The Day the Earth Stood Still. And there’s no ignoring just how similar the Controlled humans are to Pod People (Invasion of the Body Snatchers did come out in the same year, but the five months between the two should have given Corman more than enough time to steal the idea, considering his typical production schedule. Although it might be the case that both films were ripping off Invaders from Mars). But what works works, and when Corman sets his mind to it, he can make an allegorical B-movie even better than the next guy.

The way I see it, It Conquered the World is another treatise against communism and conformity, only with an unexpectedly rich philosophical duality between the red-blooded American Paul and nebbish outcast Tom. The movie is extremely wordy, with scene after scene of the men and their wives carving their way through mountains of dialogue, but the ideas at the center - while naturally pretty simplistic and retrograde – are fleshed out in a way that’s both consistent throughout the film and actually pretty compelling.

Plus, it’s for the best that the movie is mostly dialogue, because when we do pay a visit to the monstrous Venusian, it’s… rough. It resembles nothing more than an ice cream cone with fangs, drizzled in chocolate, wearing a condom on its head. Also it has lobster claws for some reason. It’s a perfectly hilarious B-movie creature, which is one reason I signed up to watch these things, but it makes it harder to take that parts that I actually like very seriously.

Behold his divine majesty!

Not only is It Conquered the World reasonably smart, it’s also unusually dour for a film of its vintage. More cautionary tale than rah-rah jingoistic fantasy, it has no qualms about straight-up murdering major characters. It’s not like we haven’t seen people being shoveled into the mouths of monsters by the handful in films like Godzilla, Beginning of the End, or The Giant Claw, but there’s something about the deaths here that are particularly brutal and violent. 

There’s no blood of course, but the deaths are perpetrated by other human beings rather than monsters. I dare you to watch through every 50’s sci-fi movie and find a single other scene where a woman is casually strangled to death or a man shoots his own wife point-blank. Hell, a portion of this movie’s microscopic effects budget was doled out to a plot-nonessential sequence of an airplane falling out of the sky and exploding! It’s very intent on grinding your face into the darker side of an alien invasion.

It Conquered the World feels like it’s breaking the rules of what these things are supposed to be, even as it’s trafficking in all the genre trappings, plot beats, and subtext that contemporary audiences had seen a million times before. Plus, although things end up pretty much exactly as expected, in the third act Beverly Garland takes up arm against the creature in a badass release of pent-up rage and feminist fury. Of course no 50’s movie was equipped to handle that type of scene well, but it’s one of the best, most exhilarating examples that I’ve yet seen. Forget film noir femme fatales, Beverly Garland is a proto-Linda Hamilton and I’m into. it.

In short, It Conquered the World is actually a pretty stellar piece, for what it is. It’s no minted classic like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it has a unique sensibility that propels it a very long way.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• The idea that an alien intelligence would notice the launch of a single satellite has now become quite preposterous.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• When a lieutenant is informed that the town is now under martial law, he exclaims, “Golly!”
• Claire’s tiny little woman brain can’t handle Tom and Paul talking science over dinner: “Maybe you’ve got something in space medicine I can use for a headache.”
• When the satellite equipment malfunctions, the one woman in the room feels the need to apologize.
• At one point Paul describes his too-small bike seat as being built for the “spanking size,” which I’m pretty sure can Only mean what I think it means.

Sensawunda:

• At one point, Tom refers to having worked on the Manhattan project in “War 2.” In addition to being the 8000th B-movie to name-drop nuclear testing, it’s the weirdest way I’ve ever heard of referring to that war.
• Dick Miller is featured here in only his third movie role, at the bright beginning of the career that would give him parts in dozens of movies produced by Corman and his compatriots.

TL;DR: It Conquered the World is a cheap, crappy sci-fi picture with a surprisingly violent sensibility and strong subtext that lifts it above a lot of its contemporaries.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1311
Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend Without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

Fright Flashback: The Eternal Grinding Of The Hollywood Machine

Welcome back to Fright Flashback, where every week until the end of summer we will visit an older horror film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to an upcoming new release. This week we are anticipating Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, the fifth of the seemingly endless Mission: Impossible movies. In celebration, we'll be revisiting Slumber Party Massacre III, another late sequel in a franchise with a mystifying number of entries.

Year: 1990

Director: Sally Mattison

Cast: Keely Christian, Brittain Frye, 

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

The Slumber Party Massacre franchise is an alarming combination of fascinating and frustrating: In short, it is a Roger Corman production. The original Slumber Party Massacre was written as a feminist pastiche of the genre, but filmed totally straight, leaving it clever but muzzled and ladled with a steam helping of nudity in levels heretofore unseen this side of the “Adults Only” curtain. Slumber Party Massacre II drops the parody angle but adds a heavy dose of Krueger-ific dreamscapes and a rock ‘n roll killer that noodles tunes on his guitar (complete with nifty drill bit attachment) before mowing down pillow fighting co-eds, one of whom is the little sister of the original survivor’s neighbor. Hey, it makes more sense than the Terminator coming back as a good guy. Sequels are tough.

Slumber Party Massacre III throws its lot wholeheartedly in with the rest, featuring authentic female behaviors in an almost neoreliast, documentary-like fashion, including spontaneous double stripteases, cookie dough finger licking, and the like. That’s all fine and dandy, really. I love me some unabashed tawdriness in a film. Not everything has to be Gone With the Wind. But in a franchise with such a strong subtextual core – the killer’s drill represents his penis, his killings are psychosexual release, and his death is castration - being saddled with such a abundance of shallow exploitation seems disingenuous. The real clincher though, is that this terminally exploitative franchise has been directed and written by women from the start, the only slasher series in existence to do so.

Being a feminist slasher blogger is like trying to hug a cactus.

Slumber Party Massacre III tells the story of – you guessed it – the 1986 NATO summit. Just kidding. It’s about, of all things, a slumber party. After a fun day of volleyball at the beach (this film very explicitly takes place in the coastal town of Playa Vista – one thing I love about this franchise is that it makes no attempts to hide its (cheap) California roots – it feels like home), a buxom group of guys and gals prepares for the night of their lives. For many of them, it will be their last. 

Let’s Meet the Meat, shall we? There’s Jackie (Keely Christian), the girl hosting the party while her parents are out of town looking at real estate; Frank (David Lawrence), her new boyfriend who looks like a Play-Doh statue of Sam Smith; Tom (David Kriegel), a schlub who sucks at volleyball; Susie (Maria Claire), who has low enough standards to overlook Tom’s total lack of personality; Maria (Maria Ford of the arthouse classic Stripped to Kill II: Live Girls), who looks like Elvira but more corpse-like and with a bigger wig, and has a thing for men over 50; assorted light and dark Meat, overstuffed; and Juliette (Lulu Wilson), who I would call the “slut” character if that title hadn’t already been claimed by literally everybody else.

As the party goes on, the attendees begin to get picked off one by one (and then all at once) by a killer in a clear mask brandishing a power drill. Could it be the creepy lurker, credited only as Weirdo (Yan Birch), who wears a black gi and a hideous blonde goatee that makes me want to break some Entourage DVDs in half, who found the house thanks to an address book that Jackie left at the beach for some inscrutable reason? Or is it the creepy neighbor Morgan (Michael Harris), who spies on the girls with a telescope, walks through unlocked doors at random, peruses anatomy textbooks in his downtime, and who clearly attended the Creepy Suspect seminar of the raw meat-eating Orville Ketchum from Sorority House Massacre II?

Or maybe it’s one of the newcomers to the party: Duncan (David Greenlee), the nerdy outcast who has been shunned by the group, and Ken (Brittain Frye of Hide and Go Shriek), the too-perfect hunk who Juliette met at the beach, whose ex-cop uncle just mysteriously committed suicide.

Also his name makes Ken doll jokes suspiciously easy.

The most striking thing about Slumber Party Massacre III is that for a crappy direct-to-video slasher sequel it actually serves up a pretty decent mystery for a good chunk of the time. This is an entirely new feature. In the first two films, there is absolutely no question that the murders are being perpetrated by Russ Thorn and… Weird Elvis Guy. So it’s doubly unexpected when this DTV 1990 flick with the dialogue about hips and thighs and Barbie commercial performances manages to keep you on the hook for so long. And the mask is genuinely creepy, too! Halfway between The Purge and Alice, Sweet Alice, it’s a slick little number that has no business being anywhere near a dunghill like this.

At least this film is honoring the franchise tradition of staunchly defying black or white categorization. But we’re here to attempt to review this rat’s nest, so let’s step back and take a look at the facts:

• Slumber Party Massacre III is the worst Slumber Party Massacre movie.

The law of diminishing returns strikes again. Never a big budget franchise, this films seems to have been made for less than the cost of a routine nipple reduction surgery (at least, circumstantial evidence seems to prove that this is so), with a series of kills that are either goreless or intimately repetitive, presumably so they could reuse the same prosthetic over and over again.

• Slumber Party Massacre III is not scary.

Well-crafted scares require a well-crafted, well, anything. Beyond an attack in a car that introduces the drill via the rearview mirror and stages the killing pretty explicitly as a penetrative sexual act, there is an utter lack of style evident in the film. Non sequitur dialogue and bland medium shots smash into one another at regular intervals, occasionally combining serendipitously into something borderline coherent.

• Slumber Party Massacre III is still… kind of good.

Damn it!

The profoundly vexing thing is that the frequently bad-good campy charms sometimes (though very rarely) shade into genuinely good-good territory. Now what am I supposed to do with that? In addition to the aforementioned first act mystery (which is no Agatha Christie but keeps you guessing for longer than most rote hack ‘n slash whodunits), there are some laugh-out-loud comic relief moments that betray this film’s buried parodic pedigree. I’ll only spoil one of these for you: Frank wants to go check out the basement, but Jackie urges him to take Duncan’s fireplace poker with him.

“Actually, these are tongs.”

OK, maybe you had to be there. But the fact remains that this film is actually a half-decent slumber party flick. You and your friends can place bets on the murderer, shiver (but not too much) at the masked driller killer, laugh yourselves silly at the wooden performances and genuine humor, and shout at dumb characters to not go in the basement when there’s an open sliding glass door twelve feet from you, ya dipstick! And thought the low budget prevents the kills from spilling more than a thimble or so of blood, there’s some extravagantly cheesy compensation, including someone being stabbed with a swordfish and a particularly clever death involving the house’s “For Sale” sign.

SPOILERS PEPPER THE REMAINDER OF THIS REVIEW!

Of course, Slumber Party Massacre III still isn’t a good film, as the entirety of the third act labors tirelessly to prove. The killer turns out to be Ken, which is interesting in its own right (the handsome, unassuming killer brings Psycho to mind – plus I like to think of it as backlash against the yuppiefied 80’s), but Frye plays psychosis like a six-year-old having a temper tantrum, and his implied, undernourished molestation backstory gets too dark too quick. After he reveals himself, there are still a good five or six girls still alive, and he begins chasing them around the house in a scene that begins exciting but rapidly deteriorates into a sloppy Caligula of idiocy.

The girls scuttle right past one another as they bleed to death, refusing to render aid or exit through the unblocked front door. Time endlessly unspools as scene after scene ticks by of girls hiding, smashing lamps over Ken’s head, then practically handing his drill back to him and starting it all over again. It’s like the final scene of Halloween, only Jamie Lee Curtis has been lobotomized and it’s played simultaneously on five different screens like one of those a cappella YouTube videos.

Nothing can take away the surprising quality and fun of the first half of Slumber Party Massacre III, but its third act can damn sure try. With some proper editing, this film could have been just as memorable as its wacky brethren, but as it stands, it’s still one big hunk of crap that I can’t say I’m sorry I saw. This unknowable, ineffable franchise is finally finished. It’s been a bumpy ride, but certainly a wild one.

Killer: Ken (Brittain Frye)

Final Girl: Jackie Cassidy (Keely Christian)

Best Kill: Juliette is electrocuted when a vibrator is tossed in the tub. It’s not even hers. She’s borrowing it.

Sign of the Times: Jackie’s jeans have a higher proportion of patches on them than actual denim.

Scariest Moment: The masked killer pursues the Pizza Girl (Marta Kober of Friday the 13th Part 2) down a moonlit street.

Weirdest Moment: After Tom complains that his ankles hurt sometimes, Ken chainsaws his Achilles tendons, admonishing, “Never ever admit your weaknesses.” Somehow, I feel like pretty much everyone has a weakness to being chainsawed in the ankles.

Champion Dialogue: “If you can’t stop your parents from moving, why don’t you just move in with us? My mom wouldn’t notice. She’s going through menopause.”

Body Count: 11; I’m not counting Tom, because unless he bled out through the ankles, he sure as patoot didn’t die.

1. Sarah is drilled through the back.
2. Michael is stabbed through the chest with a For Sale sign.
3. Pizza Girl is drilled in the gut.
4. Juliette is electrocuted with a vibrator.
5. Weirdo is stabbed in the mouth with a swordfish.
6. Duncan is slashed across the stomach with a drill.
7. Frank dies from being hit in the face somehow.
8. Janine is drilled in the gut.
9. Maria is drilled in the gut.
10. Diana is stabbed to death.
11. Ken is drilled in the gut.

TL;DR: Slumber Party Massacre III is a bad-good movie with more than occasional glimmers of brilliance.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1837
Reviews In This Series
The Slumber Party Massacre (Jones, 1982)
Slumber Party Massacre II (Brock, 1987)
Slumber Party Massacre III (Mattison, 1990)