Slumber Party Massacre: The Roger Corman Collection

Bob Clark's Black Christmas and John Carpenter's Halloween are regarded by many as the first and best stalker/slasher movies ever made. For good or ill, they spawned numerous imitations, sequels and similarly themed films with a maniacal killer, often whose identity is only revealed at the end with some kind of twist that links back to earlier events. Many of them are derivative and almost utterly devoid of artistic merit whereas others are extremely well crafted films with the kind of filmmaking skill that would grace any genre and not earn the kind of vitriolic slamming which some critics dished out not only to one film, but the whole subgenre. Gene Siskel (and, to a lesser extent, Roger Ebert) laid into the slasher film, criticising the violence and perceived misogyny that he saw within the genre.

By the time 1982 had rolled around, the format for a slasher film was fairly well-established: teenagers under threat from a mysterious stalker who dispatches them one by one with a variety of weapons and in a number of memorable ways. One of the many movies that follows this is The Slumber Party Massacre, a film that is notable as it is not only directed by a woman, Amy Holden Jones, but also written by a woman, Rita Mae Brown.

The movie follows a group of high school basketball players, led by Trish Devereaux, who like nothing more than playing ball, chatting about boys and bitching about other girls. When Trish's parents go out of town leaving her alone for the night, she arranges a slumber party for her closest friends and does her best to snub Valerie, a new girl who is better at basketball than Trish and her friends. Unbeknownst to the girls, Russ Thorn, a man convicted of murdering five people with power tools has escaped from jail and is on the loose, having already killed during his brief spell of freedom.

Whilst the gang get ready for the night, trying on new outfits and undressing in full view of the window where two of their male classmates are busy making the most of proceedings, the murderer has targeted the house and people are being brutally murdered with a power drill. As the girls aren't exactly in the mood or have the inclination to spend this time sitting around watching the news, they are blissfully unaware of how much danger they are in so, as the carnage builds outside, they are fairly unperturbed when the lights go out -- a prank by their male classmates -- and only realise something is amiss when the pizza boy turns up with their order, but brutally murdered on the doorstep.


As a rather convenient plot device, Valerie lives opposite Trish and is also spending the night home alone well, almost, as she does have her younger sister with her. It is only a question of why Russ Thorn has targeted these girls and which ones will survive the night.

I imagine the amount of oestrogen that went into making the film probably left the filmmakers hoping that what they were doing would be seen as some sort of feminist statement (Rita Mae Brown was a feminist activist) but several critics have absolutely no truck with this and consider The Slumber Party Massacre is repulsive and base as other slasher movies that they hated.

The Disc

The Picture
Sadly, no anamorphic transfer for this release, only a letterboxed 1.78:1 letterboxed picture with terrible contrast levels so the darker scenes, of which there are plenty, tend to get very murky and it is hard to pick out exactly what is happening. The extent to which the contrast levels impinge on your viewing pleasure varies throughout the film with some scenes a foggy mess where you really have to period through the gloom to make out what is happening but others aren't so bad and the lack of clarity is more of an annoyance than something which really makes following the film hard work.

The Sound
A reasonably clear Dolby Digital stereo soundtrack where the dialogue is easy to understand and, although there is a slight background hiss, the jumps are effective and the tension is fairly well built by the score.


Final Thoughts
The Slumber Party Massacre is by no means a classic slasher film and is several levels below the likes of Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street which are rightly regarded as classic slasher films. What does make this different is the presence of two female filmmakers who weren't in minor roles, but wrote and directed the movie. It is therefore all the more strange that The Slumber Party Massacre should be so ordinary and virtually indistinguishable from any other slasher movie.

I would guess that fans of the film would have a better DVD release -- one with an anamorphic transfer and extra features but, for those who slightly curious about the film, this release will do and you can make your mind up whether it is one of the more interesting of the genre or just another piece of disposable trash. I'm somewhere in between, considering the film to be nothing special, but perfectly watchable.