The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

This is basically your standard slasher movie, with a few twists. Twist one is that the killer's weapon of choice is a two foot long drill, the most blatant phallic symbol I think I've ever seen. Twist two is that it has the least scary killer in slasher movie history. This guy looks like Antonio from "Wings," but not as threatening.

You don't get a good look at the killer until the movie is more than half over. This is good, because once you do see him, you lose all respect for the people that are running and hiding from him. He's about five foot two and moves so slowly with that stupid drill that any reasonably fit person (including all of the athletic women he is stalking) could easily dodge that spinning drill bit and kick the crap out of him.

Logically, the only way you could really kill someone with a drill would be to pin them up against a reasonably hard surface. This drill, however, not only dives into human flesh without apparent resistence, it also doubles as a machette, allowing the weilder to deal death-blows by slashing with the spinning bit.

Predictably, this movie goes in for all the standard slasher movie cliches. We see our first boob about 43 seconds in, and thereafter we see an average of a pair every ten minutes. It has a "cat jumps out and scares the girl" scene, and an "open the door and let the dead guy fall in" scene. Like almost all slasher movies, it has its share of gratuitous nudity, but there is one mind-boggling example that had me laughing out loud. In the shower scene early on, we see the head and shoulders of one girl from behind as she stands in the spray, talking to the girl next to her. The camera gets a case of the wandering eyes and pans down slowly to show a shot of her butt that lasts for a few seconds. There was absolutely no good reason for this shot--it was gratuitous in the extreme.

Probably my favorite stupidity in this movie is the uniforms the girl's basketball team is practicing in near the beginning. Loose fitting shirts with low-cut necks, shorts so tight you can see each individual cheek, and apparently, no bras. For a movie whose rental box touted the fact that it was "written and directed by women", this seemed a little strange to me.

However, for a movie with all of this to laugh at, it still manages to be slow and painful in many places. Not even the inclusion of a next-door-neighbor named "Mr. Crontab" (I can hear you UNIX gurus laughing already) can make this a classic. Even so, it's well worth watching.

Scene to watch for: The short "let's go play a trick" scene

Best line: "She drinks too much milk."

Things that make you go "Huh?": The drill's demise