The Slumber Party Massacre Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		2.5

The Slumber Party Massacre Blu-ray Movie Review

Wake me when it's over.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 16, 2014

It’s a long and winding road from Rubyfruit Jungle, one of the seminal works of lesbian fiction, to The Slumber Party Massacre, a film practically guaranteed to appeal to hormonal males, but it’s a journey author and screenwriter Rita Mae Brown evidently willingly took. Brown has never been shy about her views on “traditional” sexuality, positing her belief that humans are basically bisexual in varying degrees, and that heterosexuality is an inherently oppressive practice. Brown was already a hero in the nascent worlds of feminism and a more militant lesbianism after Rubyfruit Jungle, and she apparently wanted The Slumber Party Massacre to be a take- off, something that still bubbles up from time to time in this otherwise relatively straightforward slasher film. Director Amy Holden Jones may be best known to younger audiences for having written both Mystic Pizza and Beethoven, but she also reportedly had a feminist background at the time of The Slumber Party Massacre, which may then beg the question of what all these scantily clad young women are doing running around getting slaughtered by an escaped convict? The Slumber Party Massacre doesn’t even waste much time hiding the perpetrator’s identity, meaning that the bulk of this film simply is a series of vignettes where the already revealed madman slices and dices (and/or drills, as the case may be, considering this villain’s preference for hand tools) his way through various nubile young girls. There’s nothing remotely innovative here, and in fact a lot of The Slumber Party Massacre is a cliché ridden thesaurus of virtually every hoary horror trope ever committed to celluloid, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the movie doesn’t provide a jolt or two and actually delivers a fair amount of low grade fun.

Whether you choose to see The Slumber Party Massacre as a lo-fi but unpretentious horror entry, or as a putatively more ambitious parody that somehow didn’t quite achieve the tone its author intended, there’s little doubt that the characters in the film are little more than space fillers waiting to be terrorized by a hulking menace. The ostensible storyline centers on high schooler Trish Devereaux (Michele Michaels, who later started spelling her first name Michelle). Trish’s parents are leaving town for the weekend, and like any good All American teenager, she wants to take advantage of the situation by hosting a slumber party. Trish invites her teammates on the girls’ basketball team, including a new arrival at the school named Valerie Bates (Robin Stille), but Valerie demurs after hearing what she perceives is some catty behavior by some of the other girls.

In one of the film’s few relatively nonstandard elements, we’re introduced to the eventual killer almost as quickly as we are to the victims. There’s no suspense here about who is on a serial murder spree, and in fact there’s not even any real attempt to give the character a back story, a la Michael Myers in Halloween. Instead we’re simply introduced to one Russ Thorn (Michael Villella), a leering convict with a fetish for power drills who has escaped from the joint. Brown and Jones have virtually all of the pieces in play in the film’s first several minutes, and then simply line everything up so that the carnage can unfold in grisly fashion.

While there would seem to be an ample feminist subtext lurking just beneath the surface here—a sports team comprised of girls, a couple of female professionals in unusual careers—the film never really develops the idea and in fact seems almost deliberately old fashioned anti-feminist at times. While there’s a perfectly villainous male marauding through the film (as well as a couple of horndog school guys oogling the girls as they undress), not to mention a weapon that is not exactly subtle as a symbol for male sexuality, Brown repeatedly posits the girls as panicked sheep simply awaiting the slaughter. Wouldn’t a real feminist take on this genre have turned the tables on the perpetrator, kind of like the working women did to their boss in 9 to 5? Yes, it’s a different genre and context, to be sure, but the idea remains the same. Why not at least have one of the girls utilize the drill on Thorn in the film’s bloody climax? That at least would have been a bit of poetic justice and would have perhaps upped this film’s feminist quotient considerably.

The other thing that seems to deliberately undermine any putative feminist content is the film’s almost juvenile obsession with the female body. While some of this at least is seen through the eyes of the hormonal male teenagers who are voyeurs (before they’re victims, of course), it’s hard to reconcile a film with girls running around in panties and flashing their breasts with anything supposing to be a feminist screed. Wasn’t one of the prime feminist manifestos that women were more than their bodies? Why, then, do Brown and Jones so intently focus on this very aspect, without even the barest (an anagram of breast, by the way) hint of irony?

And so divorcing this film from any supposed “serious” meta concept leaves a fairly standard and predictable, though at time decently suspenseful and gory, slasher (and/or driller) film. There are a couple of nicely done set pieces, though at least some of them have an undercurrent of probably unintentional humor (my favorite is when two of the girl barricade themselves in a bedroom, only to have the murderer climb in through the window behind them, without them having even a clue that he’s coming). The Slumber Party Massacre won’t give anyone any sleepless nights (evidently a working title for the film at one point), and it may at least promote an occasional doze or two despite a few moments of tension. It’s a middling entry that could have been quite interesting had Rita Mae Brown’s instincts been allowed to fully flower.

The Slumber Party Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Slumber Party Massacre is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. According to Shout!'s press information (which is repeated on the disc's insert itself) , this is a new transfer sourced from the original camera negative. Expectations should still probably be moderated, for this extremely low budget affair is not what is called in today's common parlance "sharp", though the colors are extremely well saturated and accurate looking. Detail is at least incrementally improved from the DVD release, but perhaps not as dramatically as some might expect or hope. Shout! has frequently gone on the offensive about digital noise reduction, stating (including here on our forums) that they never indulge in the practice, and that certainly seems to be the case here. Grain is actually fairly chunky at times (which you'll be able to spot in some of the screenshots accompanying this review), though usually organic looking. There are some minor compression artifacts noticeable in some of the very darkest segments, including some of the nighttime out of door chase scenes. Overall, though, this is another commendable effort from Shout!, a label which continues to bring out one cult film after another, at least occasionally surprising fans with new high definition transfers.

The Slumber Party Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Slumber Party Massacre features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track (delivered via DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0) which suffices well enough for the film's dialogue, score and effects. The lower midrange here is just a bit on the anemic side, meaning some of the shock edits with accompanying low frequency effects don't have quite the sonic "oomph" that modern day horror fans have come to expect, but overall there's nothing of any major concern here, and the track certainly has no damage or other issues of import to discuss.

The Slumber Party Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Sleepless Nights: The Making of The Slumber Party Massacre (1080i; 23:04) is a redacted version of a longer documentary about all three Slumber Party Massacre outings, and has some nice interview segments interspersed with scenes from the film.


• Interview with Rigg Kennedy (1080p; 13:22) is a very enjoyable piece featuring the actor who plays the hapless neighbor to the girls, which also includes some outré performance art.


• The Slumber Party Massacre Trailer (1080p; 1:58)


• The Slumber Party Massacre II Trailer (1080p; 1:48)


• The Slumber Party Massacre III Trailer (1080p; 1:05)


• Still Gallery (1080p; 3:20)


• Audio Commentary with Amy Holden Jones, Actors Michael Villella and Debra Del Liso is the same commentary from the DVD, hosted by Tony Brown. This is occasionally fitful but has some actually kind of weirdly picayune reminiscences on the part of Jones.

The Slumber Party Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I had the pleasure of meeting Rita Mae Brown many, many years ago when she came to my college to take part in some writers' seminars that I had been selected to participate in as a student. I found her incredibly funny and acerbic, and only wish some of those aspects had made it intact into The Slumber Party Massacre. Genre enthusiasts will almost certainly find enough here to enjoy, but even they will probably admit (perhaps under duress) that this is far from the finest example of an eighties slasher flick. The technical merits here are very good, and Shout! has included some nice supplements as well.