

At a super lean 76 minutes, I walked into this movie being pretty sure The Slumber Party Massacre exists only to give us 'teen girls' in various stages of nudity. There's nothing wrong with that because the movie's honest in its exploitation of every single woman in the movie.



But here's where it gets weird, because I didn't want to write the opener like that without making sure I wasn't imagining things, because let's be real: female nudity in horror movies throughout the 70s and 80s seemed to be the sole reason some horror movies existed in the first place. 



The Slumber Party Massacre was written by a feminist and directed by a feminist. Rita Mae Brown wanted to make a movie that eviscerated slasher tropes, and Amy Holden Jones did her job in titillating audiences (and me, if I'm honest) as well as any horny male film undergrad ever could. Funnily enough, Brown wrote it as a parody while Jones was tasked with shooting it as a straight slasher flick, and it WORKS.



The women talk about baseball and the men, when confronted with danger, squirm and cower. 



As far as I can tell, we're never given a reason why the killer's out there massacring anyone, let alone beautiful women, but massacre he does, and with a drill so weighty in its phallic girthiness he might as well be running around with a saw-toothed dildo the size of someone's forearm. 



Again, this is not a complaint. It's an awesome realization I picked up after wanting to learn more about why such a very short movie seemed to be so well loved by so many.



Whether you look at The Slumber Party Massacre as a tits-out slasher flick and love every second of it or a feminist deconstruction of the male gaze in horror movies with added blood, we come to the same place at the same time. 



This one's fun, has no fluff, and is worth the hour and a bit.

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)