Fourteen years before Scream<\/em>, lesbian activist and Rubyfruit Jungle<\/em> author Rita Mae Brown wrote a screenplay called Don\u2019t Open the Door<\/em>, in which she attempted to spoof the then-ubiquitous slasher films that were the packing multiplexes in the wake of Halloween<\/em> and Friday the 13<\/em>th<\/sup><\/em>, causing Siskel and Ebert all sorts of tsuris every week as they railed against what Roger described as \u201cDead Teenager Movies.\u201d Rewritten by director Amy Holden Jones and rechristened The Slumber Party Massacre<\/em>, the resulting picture is a fiendishly funny parody played completely straight. (So straight that a lot of dismissive critics confused it with the genuine article. But then again, as a horny pubescent I rented the movie on VHS more than once for obvious reasons, and I\u2019m pretty sure I wasn\u2019t in on the joke, either.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Produced by Roger Corman\u2019s New World Pictures, The Slumber Party Massacre<\/em> delivers all the blood, gore and leering T&A one would want from one of these derided Dead Teenager Movies, but it does so with droll wit and a sly sense of self-awareness. It\u2019s a movie that always knows exactly what it\u2019s doing, from the early, contractually obligated girls\u2019 locker room shower scene during which the camera makes an ostentatious point of panning downward after all the dialogue is done, just to make sure we get an unobstructed view of our heroine\u2019s bare behind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Her name is Trish, by the way, and her parents are going out of town this weekend. She wants to have some friends over, but no boys are allowed. Played by Michele Michaels (who like most horror movie teenagers, doesn\u2019t look a day over 25) she\u2019s first seen putting all her old stuffed animals and Barbie dolls in the trash, signaling to the audience \u2013 and her creepily over-attentive, trash-picking neighbor \u2013 that she\u2019s on her way to becoming a woman. Trish has also got what\u2019s pretty clearly a crush on Valerie (Robin Stille), the girl next door. But then, most of the female characters we encounter in The Slumber Party Massacre<\/em> are unsubtly coded as lesbians, from the hottie hard-hat telephone line worker to our old standby, the girls\u2019 gym teacher. When we meet the men in the movie, we begin to understand why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What a bunch of mewling, ineffectual losers, the worst of which is Michael Villela\u2019s recently escaped mass murderer, Russ Thorn. He\u2019s hardly an iconic figure of fright like Michael Myers or Jason Vorhees, but rather a sniveling psychopath in a Canadian tuxedo, prowling around the neighborhood with an electric power drill that\u2019s just the tip of this movie\u2019s endless phallic symbols and penetration gags. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Jones went to Wellesley College and studied film at MIT. Her thesis project won the American Film Institute\u2019s student competition and so impressed a judge by the name of Martin Scorsese that he hired her to be his assistant while he was making Taxi Driver <\/em>and later had her edit his documentary short American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince<\/em>. Saying she was too good to be an assistant, Scorsese recommended her to his old pal Corman, who quickly had her cutting films for the likes of Joe Dante. Jones was soon so in demand that she\u2019d actually been hired to edit E.T.<\/em> for Steven Spielberg when she walked away to make The Slumber Party Massacre<\/em>. (This has to be the only time in history anyone ever quit a Spielberg picture to go shoot a slasher movie for Roger Corman. But then directing gigs weren\u2019t easy to come by back then, especially for a woman.)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you grew up watching enough of these things late at night on cable television, what\u2019s most striking about The Slumber Party Massacre<\/em> is how elegantly assembled it is, with vibrant colors, crisp editing and clearly defined action that makes clever use of background and foreground planes. The studiously terrible acting \u2013 which I\u2019m assuming must be part of the joke \u2013 adds to the half-kidding vibe of a slasher movie in scare quotes. Jones gets a lot of comic mileage out of our characters failing to notice corpses (or in some cases, actual murders) in their midst, with a sublime bit of slapstick involving a dead body in the fridge while the Playgirl-reading little-sister wants to steal a beer. Lots of folks point to the film\u2019s final castration gag as their favorite, but to this critic, the film\u2019s most relatable message can be found in its silliest scene: Just because the delivery guy showed up with his eyeballs drilled out doesn\u2019t mean you need to let a perfectly good pizza go to waste. “The Slumber Party Massacre” is now streaming on The Criterion Channel<\/a>, Shudder<\/a>, and a variety of AVOD services<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Slumber-Party-Massacre-1024x576.jpg\")
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