Part of Hoop-Tober

“That’s odd. None of the fuses are blown, but some of them are missing.”

In her seminal 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey wrote at length and persuasively about the pervasive male gaze in movies. Positing a psychoanalytic approach to film interpretation heavily indebted to Freud, Mulvey spoke of the patriarchal system in which classical Hollywood cinema had developed and the way in which that system interacted with male and female characters. Male protagonists and women to be looked at with both lust and fear (their lack of certain key organs symbolic of castration). A phallocentric approach, with men associated with activity and women associated with passivity. It is truly a…

The Russ is loose and looking for some mother fuckers to kill. Bye-bye parents. Mr. Contant's styling and profiling hair. Your last ladder. PowerFUCKIN'tools. Basketball. Showers after basketball. Locker room chit-chat. Valerie drinks too much milk. Locked in and fucked. A missing pussy. Awesome-as-fuck piano music. Fuckin' spooked. The misfit little sister. Sweet bicycles. Weekends were made for Michelob and Maui Wowie. Red Kool-Aid. Girls look at Playgirl? A pajama party peep-show. Death to snails. Fuckin' Boo Boo. Missing fuses. A very dull knife. The Brooke Shields look. Bye-bye head. Brave-horny-teenage-boys-who-try-like-a-mother-fucker-to-survive-the-night. The slice of pizza you never thought would get eaten. Death in a trunk. An extreme reaction. Guess who's coming through the window? Teen drinking is very bad. A…

Oh hahaha ….silly. Hypothetically, A power drill would be my last weapon of choice with which to terrorize a slumber party full of scantily clad buxom beauties. A drill is optimized to penetrate through firm surfaces with properly applied and stabilized force, using it on the move is no good at all and a drill bit is terrible at boring through soft quivering, sweaty flesh. The point just slides right off like every time I mean am I right? Same goes with reciprocating saws. Pshhh…movies. And then you have to make the choice of dealing with an extension cord or going with battery power and heaven knows when those things are going to quit on you. No thanks. You never…

"The Slumber Party Massacre" is your typical standard slasher movie. At no point does the film try and reinvent the wheel or even attempt to escape its genre tropes. Instead it plays up to them. We get an excess of nudity, jump scares, fake outs, over the top gory death scenes, and it's a lot of silly fun.

The film is only 77 minutes long and the pacing flows steadily. The action is interspersed regularly throughout which retained my interest seeing as how the actual "characters" aren't developed beyond their cardboard cliches.

Surprisingly the film managed to craft a really interesting deranged killer without the need of any silly gimmicks. The unstoppable killer is just an average guy who's escaped…

This was a film that I remember hearing about growing up, but had never gotten around to seeing it. I made it part of my 31 Days of Halloween challenge as it fit into a couple of categories for me. I had also heard podcasts talk about it, so I was also intrigued. The official synopsis is a high school student’s slumber party turns terrifying as an escaped mental patient with a drill decides to crash the evening.

Now this film doesn’t really pull any punches. You learn from the beginning that there is an escaped convict who had murdered 5 people. We start off though in the room of Trish (Michelle Michaels). She gets dressed and heads off to…