The 1987 Slasher Sequel Slumber Party Massacre II Is a Rockabilly Semi-Musical with an Unforgettable Killer
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Welcome, boils and ghouls, to the latest entry in Shocktember. It’s that very special time of the year when I jump the gun on Halloween fun by making the spooky season a multi-month affair. Why? Because I love it! I love Halloween. I love scary movies. I love tradition. And I love that my children love Halloween even more than I do.
This year one very kindly patron has been paying for me to watch and write up some spooktacular sequels for this column. First I treated myself to the grindhouse masterpiece Maniac Cop 2, which is legitimately one of the best B movies I’ve ever seen.
I cannot say enough good things about Maniac Cop 2. It’s everything an unrelentingly sleazy, action-horror shocker about an undead, murderous police officer should be. I followed it up with Waxwork II: Lost in Time, which I would not recommend but was certainly interesting to watch and write about and has more going for it, and more going on, than 90 percent of all horror films.
My journey through the weird world of horror sequels continues with 1987’s Slumber Party Massacre II. It’s a cult film whose cover art made an indelible impression on me as a stupid, scared horny kid, as did the cover art for its 1982 predecessor.
The VHS boxes for Slumber Party Massacre and Slumber Party Massacre II offer striking iconography that captures the lurid appeal of the movies on a visceral level. Each shows pajama-clad slumber partiers cowering underneath a phallic power drill being wielded by either an unseen man or a rockabilly madman with an electric guitar with a drill at the end.
As a child I was transfixed by the idea of an electric guitar that could also be used to viciously murder girls just trying to enjoy a scantily clad, pillow fight-laden, homoerotic sleepover. It seemed like maybe the single greatest idea in the history of slasher movies, if not cinema as a whole.
Despite being blown away by the genius of making a slasher film whose villain is a Sha Na Na reject with a Body Double electric guitar of death that’s all about killer licks and killing hot chicks, I somehow had not seen Slumber Party Massacre II until this morning.
I’m glad that I corrected that grievous oversight in my cultural education because, while Slumber Party Massacre II is not as a good as, say, Citizen Kane, it is a lot of fun and also only seventy-five minutes long.
Wings star Crystal Bernard stars as Courtney Bates, a survivor of the titular bloodbath from the first motion picture. Like most teenage girls, Courtney can only think about two things: the dreamy boy she has a crush on and just barely surviving a savage attack that killed many of her friends and left her sister in a mental hospital.
If I was the deeply traumatized survivor of a slumber party massacre I would avoid slumber parties for the rest of my life. I’d try not to even think of slumber parties. I’d try to forget that slumber parties even existed. I would try to wipe the concept of slumber parties out of my mind completely.
Not our Courtney. She’s part of a rock and roll band made up of exclusively of women who somehow manage to play their instruments while barely touching them. The seemingly lobotomized models in Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” video were more convincing as musicians.
So even though she’s plagued by flashbacks to the worst moments of her tragic existence and images of screaming girls being torn limb from limb by a power drill she decides to go to a slumber party with her bandmates anyway.
Courtney’s friend group is made up entirely of total babes who look great in lingerie and other skimpy nighttime attire. Unfortunately while the girls are dancing around provocatively while drinking champagne and having a pillow fight one of the girl’s top gets wet and she has to take it off, exposing her nubile naked breasts.
Fantasy sequences, flashbacks and dream sequences are hoary cliches in slasher movies but writer-director Deborah Brock, who would go on to write and direct Rock and Roll High School Forever for Slumber Party Massacre 2 producer Roger Corman, leans so heavily on them that the whole film begins to feel like a trippy dream.
Slumber Party Massacre II is one of those sleazy exploitation movies that’s so consistently weird and unexpected in its choices that it borders on avant-garde.
Courtney is convinced that the driller killer behind the previous slumber party massacre is back in action and out to finish what he started despite being dead. She also believes that he has posthumously drill-killed her friend but when she reappears while the police are there she loses all credibility with law enforcement.
Her fears are justified. The drill killer from the first film is now a rock and roll serial killer in all black who is a vicious, remorseless murderer with an unquenchable lust for blood.
Even more horrifyingly he’s also a modern day rockabilly revivalist who vamps and struts his way through an entire musical number about how he’s very rich and has an electric drill for murdering.
Yes, a musical number. Slumber Party Massacre II runs a mere seventy-five minutes yet it somehow has time to be a semi-musical feature full musical numbers from both the girl band at its core and the drill killer with the homicidal axe.
Despite being dead the Drill Killer kills most of Courtney’s friends, and the horny dudes who came over to get lucky but is finally and dramatically killed by the Final Girl despite already being dead.
Slumber Party Massacre II consequently doesn’t make a lot of sense. Heck, it doesn’t make ANY sense at all but that’s part of its insane charm. It feels less like a traditional sequel than a fever dream or waking nightmare.
Slumber Party Massacre II works because the Rockabilly Drill Killer is a great horror movie bad guy, the perfect combination of greaser attitude and slasher psychosis. According to Wikipedia, the original Slumber Party Massacre was conceived by Rita Mae Brown, author of the seminal lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle as well as a series of best-selling novels where cats solve crimes, as a parody of slasher conventions but filmed as a relatively straightforward horror film.
Slumber Party Massacre II similarly oscillates between parody and straight-up horror but ultimately delivers its scares with a very big wink and an equally vast smile.
So if you have seventy-five minutes to spare and want to satiate your curiosity about that sleazy horror movie with the lurid video box I think you’ll find Slumber Party Massacre II to a painless way to pass some time that lives up and down to its title.
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