The Slumber Party Massacre

I went in knowing this had an all-woman creative team, but it was only after watching that I learned feminist activist Rita Mae Brown wrote the script as a slasher parody, but producer-director Amy Holden Jones shot it as a straight exploitation picture.

The setup proves familiar. A group of high school senior girls gathers for a slumber party, unaware an escaped lunatic has targeted them for murder. I appreciated the gender flips. One character keeps a Playgirl stashed under her mattress. All the male characters save the killer prove ineffectual.

But the disconnect between the script’s intent and execution results in several scenes of unintentional comedy. In one, two guys can’t hear a woman screaming and pounding in a van parked mere feet away. In another, a girl charges upstairs armed with a circular saw, only to snap backward when she maxes the power cord. In a different movie, these scenes could be funny but placed between the brutal, serious murders, they annoyed me.

Disappointing. What could have achieved Beyond the Valley of the Dolls levels of satire results in a curious oddity.