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)

Census Bloodbath: Second Thoughts

If you're new to Census Bloodbath, click here.
For our podcast episode about this very film, click here.

Year: 1981

Director: Steve Miner

Cast: Amy Steel, John Furey, Betsy Palmer

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

And we have arrived at Jason's first starring vehicle! What a pleasure it is going to be to see this hockey masked buffoon get his time in the limelight!

Wait, what?

Yeah, you got me. The hockey mask doesn't come into play until Part 3, making this another Friday the 13th with a misinformed reputation. Perhaps this is a good time for me to mention how improperly memory has treated this series. You know how all Friday the 13th movies go, right? Ask anyone. Jason Voorhees in a hockey mask kills camp counselors at Crystal Lake.

This combination does not happen one single time in the entire 12 movie franchise. Sorry to burst your bubble. This is getting a little technical, but here's the deal. To start off, camp counselors die in only three of the films (Parts 1, 2, and 6). In the first, as we've already discussed, the killer was his mother. In the second (which we'll approach in more detail very shortly), he has no mask and also they're not even at Crystal Lake. Part 6 is the closest (he has the mask and he mows down counselors) but guess what? The camp has been renamed to Camp Forest Green.

I know that one's a technicality, but isn't that weird to think about?

Nothing anybody knows about this series is even remotely true.

Anyway, that's all in the future. Right now it's 1981. We have Jason in a bag, the hockey mask has never existed and as a matter of fact neither has adult Jason.

The film tries to smooth that narrative wrinkle (having him die as a child in the first film rather complicated sequel opportunities) by saying it only seemed like he drowned and that he saw his mother get beheaded that fateful night and vowed revenge on her killer and any others who intrude upon his territory. Apparently he never saw fit to approach her before then and give her a quick heads up that, you know, he was still alive. Whatever. He was busy. I get it.

So now he's all growed up and the movie opens two months after the original. Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) is trying to put her life together but is still haunted by nightmares (that take the form of five minutes of footage from the last movie crudely grafted onto shots of her not only failing to act but failing to be convincingly asleep).

She is run through a conveyor belt of horror standards as she gets a mysterious phone call where there's nobody on the other line, hears noises, takes the world's fastest shower, and has a cat thrown at her from offscreen by a PA.

Unfortunately her time is up and as she goes to get some milk for her tea, she gets a rather nasty surprise in her fridge, followed by a nasty surprise in her temple (an ice pick).

So that's what head cheese is.

Now it's five years later, her body was never found, and the shore of Crystal Lake is being used for the first time since the campground was condemned after the original murders.

Paul Holt (John Furey) has opened up a counselor training camp not far from the blackened ruins of Camp Blood. The events of half a decade ago have faded in memory and Jason has been reduced to nothing but a campfire story. 

As training begins, a heaping platter of Meat is laid before us in unprecedented amounts. First we meet the obvious analogues for Jack, Marcie, and Ned from the original. There's Jeff (Bill Randolph), the horndog and something of a Walmart brand Brad Pitt; his girlfriend Sandra (Marta Kober) who is adventurous and pushy; and Ted (Stu Charno) the prankster. Apparently the writers couldn't be bothered to even try to hide the fact that he is transparently Ned, just in a different body.

Thus begins the well-worn Friday the 13th standby of "exactly the same, only different." It only serves to underscore the fact that the individual characters don't matter. All that anyone cares about are the infinite variations in the ways that they screw and the ways that they die (Sometimes at the same time. More on that later).

Also on the crew are Terry (Kirsten Baker), who I took to calling "Slutty McSlutNipples" in my notes because of how clear her exact purpose in the script was; 

She gives the franchise its first full frontal! And has some gleefully sleazy innuendos that make me love her.

Scott (Russell Todd, who we'll revisit in Chopping Mall), the stud bucket who relentlessly pursues Terry like a five-year-old, stealing her clothes when she goes skinny dipping and hitting her with rocks from a sling shot; Mark (Tom McBride), a wheelchair-bound counselor with enormous arms; Vickie (Lauren-Marie Taylor, who we'll also see again in Girls Nite Out if I ever get my hands on the DVD), a clean cut girl who can't help but notice said enormous arms; and Ginny (Amy Steel, also of April Fool's Day and my fantasy dinner parties), Paul's girlfriend and all around spunky queen doing awesome things all over the place like cutting firewood with a chainsaw, winning at chess, and running the fastest (foreshadowing!).

There's also some random extra counselors with no lines, but some of them are ethnic and break stereotypes by not actually dying.

Also a Rock in a Puddle that is onscreen more times than the black counselor.

Not exactly a paradise of diversity.

Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney) also makes a brief reappearance to spout more prophecies of doom only to become the first victim of Jason's rampage. And because the movie needed to have more kills to spice things up before the real bloodbath begins.

The first act is breezy and fun as we settle in with the characters. Much like the first film, there's not much plot of import, but it's just enjoyable to watch these teens have a good time. We learn that Slutty McSlutNipples' dog is named Muffin, which is the best thing ever. Jeff and Sandra expand the narrative universe a bit by exploring the condemned Camp Blood which is so dilapidated it might as well be made of cardboard (That was a joke. It is made of carboard).

There is some great use of foreshadowing in this sequence as well, the subtlety of which is balanced out by the bluntness of the expository dialogue. Ginny is a Child Psychology major, a character trait that is introduced with all of the grace of a first time writer who is also a boxing champion. Paul literally says "Why don't you use some of that child psychology you're majoring in?"

This guy.

When half the counselors leave to spend a night out on the town, things start to get hairy.

The counselors that chose to stay behind fall into the typical patterns of Friday the 13th teenagerhood, drinking, smoking, banging, and dying. Although the gore scenes are positively modest in comparison to the original (the MPAA had begun its first of a series of crackdowns on the slasher genre), what is shown is gleefully wicked.

Jeff and Sandra are speared mid-coitus in a bald ripoff of Twitch of the Death Nerve (one of the franchise's favorite victims) that nonetheless is shocking and fun, Vickie sits immobile in fear and watches Jason approach her for about ten seconds with a big knife and thus earning her a spot in my Ten Modern Horror Rules list, and Jason proves once and for all that he is an equal opportunity serial killer.

What a nice guy.

Slutty McSlutNipples goes skinny dipping alone because she's a brave queen. The clincher? Earlier that evening when she decided to stick around and look for her dog she said "I think I'll stay too, Muffin may show." This is seriously my favorite thing that has ever happened. Call me sleazy if you want, but exploitation cinema has never gotten more clever and cheesy and wonderful than that very line. Perfection.

Sooner or later, Ginny is the only one left and boy is she ready. She knees Jason in the crotch, attacks him with a chainsaw, and although she makes the fatal error of failing to double tap, she utilizes her child psychology knowledge to placate Jason by pretending to be his mother.

Jason is macheted by a miraculously alive Paul, and the two limp off into what I would call the most bizarre shock ending ever if I hadn't already seen the next film in the series. Everything is fine, but the door creaks open to reveal... Muffin!

Then Jason bursts through the window.

Then it was all a dream.

Then Paul has vanished.

I don't know anything about what happened here and I don't care about spoiling it because it's so outrageously hackneyed and stupid and sequelly. At least we got the genuinely frightening and cool Final Girl sequence beforehand.

In this gif, Jason is played by Warrington Gillette. Contrary to what he claims, he did not play Jason in any of the other scenes. Boo Warrington Gillette.

Overall, Friday the 13th Part 2 is tremendously fun if less shocking and grubbily powerful than the original. The script is strong enough to shoulder some of the burden left by the diluted gore effects and Amy Steel gives a layered performance as Ginny even if the other actors leave something to be desired. 

You know what? No they don't. I'm too jaded to desire good acting from these things. At least Amy is flawless.

Steve Miner (who was an associate producer on the original film) directs like he actually has a brain, and the movie benefits greatly from it. His scenes of darkness hide objects just enough to render them scary instead of just obscuring everything in sight. He also utilizes some basic deep focus cinematography that frame foreground and background objects in ways that relate to one another. Not exactly rocket science, but it shows more effort than the utterly workmanlike Sean S. Cunningham.

Ginny doesn't like hacks.

Friday the 13th Part 2 has nothing on the campy joy of later entries, but it's a solidly made and occasionally scary slasher film in the Crystal Lake saga (my unofficial name for the first four films before things got weird).

One more thing before I go (I know, I know. I'm almost done.). I mentioned earlier that the mantra of the franchise is "exactly the same, only different" which is perhaps a little unfair. Each Friday the 13th film is comprised of a million little details that are radically different from any other film in the franchise that lend it texture.

This film is no different as our expectations are subverted left and right.

The most obvious example is that Ted the prankster somehow survives the ordeal. Who could have seen that coming? He's happily ensconced in a bar booth miles away during the bloodbath. I already mentioned that the ethnic counselors survive, but that's worth mentioning again and again in an 80's horror film.

Also the clean cut prude looking girl turns out to be the horniest of them all (choice dialogue: "I only need your fingers." "Let's play for position.") and Ginny pretty clearly gets it on with Paul, ripping the Final Girl standard off its hinges.

And my favorite pairing. Slutty McSlutNipples never has sex and the studbucket strikes out. Take a look at him on your way out and don't tell me you're not surprised.

Slingshot. There's a joke in there somewhere.

Killer: Jason Voorhees (Steve Dash), and what a pleasure it is to be writing those words.

Final Girl: Ginny Field (Amy Steel)

Best Kill: Coitus interruptus 

Sign of the Times: Vickie's "sexy outfit" is a bulky sweater with geometric shapes.

Scariest Moment: Jason rips his pitchfork through the canvas roof of Ginny's car.

Weirdest Moment: It is shown that Ginny wears a bra. Take a close look, it's the last one you'll ever see in a Friday the 13th film.

Champion Dialogue: "This place is starting to look like a Burger King."

Body Count: 10; I included Paul even though nobody actually knows what happened to him. Also a dog maybe. The ending is really inconsistent.

1. Alice is stabbed in the temple with an ice pick.
2. Crazy Ralph is strangled to death with barbed wire.
3. The Cop gets the back of a hammer in his skull.
4. Scott's throat is slit with a machete.
5. Terry is killed offscreen.
6. Mark gets a machete in the face, then rolls down a flight of stairs.
7. Jeff is impaled with a spear while boning Sandra.
8. Sandra is impaled with a spear while boning Jeff.
9. Vickie is stabbed in the chest.
10. Paul mysteriously vanishes. 

TL;DR: Friday the 13th Part 2 is more technically proficient than its predecessor but can't fully recapture the grubby magic.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 2174

Reviews In This Series

Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)
Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D (Miner, 1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus, 1993)
Jason X (Isaac, 2001)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)