Slumber Party Massacre (1982)
HORROR-THON 2022 • HOUSE PARTY
9/10
DIRECTOR: Amy Holden Jones
STARRING: Michele Michaels, Robin Stille, Michael Villella
RELEASED: 1982
RUNTIME: 1 hour, 17 minutes
WATCH ON: Shudder, AMC+, Prime Video, The Roku Channel, Apple TV
SCARE LEVEL: Low to medium, with lots of laughs
EAT THE PIZZA: Always
The pizza delivery guy is dead on the front step. The girls are hiding inside with knives. Someone is hungry, so they eat the pizza. That one scene is the whole movie, and I love it.
High schooler Trish’s parents are out of town for the weekend, so she throws a slumber party for the girls from her basketball team. Meanwhile, a serial killer named Russ Thorn has just escaped from prision and he has a very large power drill.
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Valerie the girl next door didn’t get invited. She’s babysitting her little sister across the street and keeps glancing over at the party. Some boys show up to spy on the girls. The killer shows up too. Nobody can quite take any of it seriously until the bodies start piling up, and then they absolutely do.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
It’s a classic slasher. The house, the sleepover, and the killer roaming the neighborhood are all there. What makes Slumber Party Massacre great is that it doesn’t take itself seriously. It was written by Rita Mae Brown, a feminist novelist, and Amy Holden Jones directed it almost straight, but the jokes made it through. That’s why it’s actually funny on purpose.
That’s also what makes the drill so ridiculous. It’s huge, and it’s clearly a metaphor. This movie knows it’s a metaphor.
There is a good amount of gore; it doesn’t hold back on the kills, but somehow the tone never gets too dark.
And the pizza. The girls are trapped in the house, the delivery guy has just been killed, and they are starving. So naturally, they eat the pizza. It’s the most realistic thing anyone has ever done in a horror movie. Always eat the pizza after the pizza guy is killed. It’s important to stay fueled.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
The Scream Queen herself, Brinke Stevens, perfected the art of screaming in this movie. She spent 45 minutes in a parking lot with a sound guy screaming into a microphone for her off-camera death scene. She ended up using the same technique throughout her career.