Danishka Esterhazy’s new remake/reimagining/whatever of “Slumber Party Massacre” begins with an idea so ingenious, it’s surprising no one’s done it before: packing a full feature’s worth of action into the pre-title sequence. It amounts to a remake in miniature; in those opening minutes, Esterhazy introduces final girl Trish Devereaux (Masali Baduza) and all of her friends, who are plucked off one by one by driller killer Russ Thorne (Rob van Vuuren), before she kills him, and then the credits roll.
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This is where the connections to the original film basically end – “Slumber Party Massacre” shares the title and some character names, and the signature weapon but little else. This is, sadly, where the invention ends as well. We jump ahead from the 1993 setting of the prologue to the present day, where Trish (played as an adult by Schelaine Bennett) has a bad case of the “Halloween” (2018)-style PTSD; she never leaves the house (“I have everything I need right here”), perhaps because Thorne’s body was never found. And now, Trish’s daughter, Dana (Hannah Gonera), and her friends are heading out of town for a slumber party of their own (with a younger sister stowing away).
You can guess what happens next: their car breaks down and the local yokel says it will take at least a day to repair, so off they go to a musty, creepy rental, where, over the long night that follows, they’ll make many inexplicable decisions and history will repeat itself – perhaps accidentally, perhaps not.
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Along the way, there are a couple of genuinely horrifying kills (a bit under the hood of a car is gnarly and grisly), and Esterhazy has some fun with substituting the female gaze into slasher movie standbys, so we have scenes of scantily clad guys having pillow fights or taking gratuitous showers. But those scenes are done so broadly that the film veers into spoof territory, which throws the tone way out of whack; they’ll swing from the goofiest “Psycho” parody since “High Anxiety” to a top-volume argument about fear and blame. For long stretches, “Slumber Party Massacre” can’t decide if it wants to be a scary movie or a “Scary Movie.”
And there are plenty of other problems. The relationships between this group of longtime besties, simply aren’t credible; their byplay sounds scripted and forced, and the weird little bi-implication interlude between two key characters is a set-up that doesn’t pay off (unless it’s some kind of homage to the kind of close-reads that queer viewers used to have to give genre movies – in which case, y’know what, it’s 2021, we can spell things out now). The plotting is plodding, with Suzanne Keilly’s script teeing up one big reveal after another that any thoughtful audience member will see coming a mile away. And there’s an odd, TV-movie cheapness to the cinematography and cutting – this is a Syfy Original, and more often than not, it looks like it.
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Above all else, “Slumber Party Massacre” never presents anything resembling a justification for its existence. The 1982 original was a much-needed corrective to the casual misogyny and testosterone-heavy perspective of the slasher genre, with screenwriter Rita Mae Brown and director Amy Holden Jones sending up the already-established tropes and inserting wry feminist commentary into the proceedings. What made that film so memorable, so special, was that it was so subversive.
But female empowerment, self-aware gags, and in-joke storytelling are the norm now, so this new film doesn’t feel dangerous or convention-bucking the way the original did; in fact, by remaking a classic property with nostalgia-friendly name recognition, it’s the exact opposite. The new “Slumber Party Massacre” feels like the last thing a movie with this title should be: safe. [C-]
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