Slumber Party Massacre II is not the first Slumber Party Massacre - what on God's green Earth could be? - but it cuts its own distinctive style by being so adorably terrible that one can't help but admire it somehow. It has padding in its 75 minute run-time, and can do that since the girl friends around the main character have a band (the sister from the previous film, Courtney, of the main girl from the last movie, though damn if I could remember that even having just seen the first one two weeks ago, different actress by the way of course).
It's also a movie where if there even *is* a serial killer is in question since it could all be in the majorly PTSD'd, nightmare-riddled Courtney's mind. If the first movie was liberally borrowing (one might say ripping off but no, heavens no, that's not the Corman way is it?) from Halloween, then this is liberally borrowing from the Nightmare on Elm Street films (a scene of Courtney in a bath-tub seems like it was lifted so hard from the first one its ridiculous, and I almost thought it would oddly enough take from the third one, which came out the same year, but not quite the case), and at the heart of it is the most awesomely silly killer I've ever seen in a slasher.
Who is this killer? Try to imagine Quentin Tarantino hit his head on a sink and after he came to was tasked to write an 80's slasher movie - this is what he might come up with: Atanas Ilitch is having the time of his life playing this "Driller Killer", who would appear to be a psychological terror of Courtney's years after the first massacre happened, but is um... actually there? Is that a spoiler? The reasoning for why he finally leaps forward may actually make some sense is going by the usual (strict?) code of conduct for these kinds of movies - if you're a virgin, the moment you have sex is when you get it right through the vitals - and but in the moment it seems like it has only the slimmest rationale, and it fully becomes a "slasher", as in Ilitch's killer going after these innocent/obnoxious teens (some more than others), in the last act.
Before this is a lot of gloriously dumb scenes; at one point, the girls have an actual pillow fight and some/most of them take off their clothes to do so, and on that immediate beat two of the guys in the movie look on through a window and say, "they actually DO do this!" Again, the songs take up a good number of minutes (without them this might barely make a feature-length run-time), but they're not the worst ever, just that kind of mediocre 80's rock-pop that Corman was able to buy for 10 cents. The performances are also what you expect, but what makes the movie stand out a bit is that the filmmaker - once again a woman, and Corman was good about hiring women to make his movies, regardless of artistry, Deborah Brock in this case - tries to ape at times another Corman alumni, Jonathan Demme; there are multiple scenes where characters look directly at the camera as if to us and speak (for example when one of the teens finally calls the cops, prematurely really, when Courtney is having one of her hallucination/nightmare freak-outs). What is this supposed to do? I am sure I still don't know.
A lot of this is not good, and actually it's pretty terrible. What gives it the rating it gets is that it's a massively entertaining bad movie, one of those that sticks out among the multitudes of 80's slashers (and back then you could randomly throw a rock and hit a piece of s*** slasher movie); what is significant here is that the pace never slackens too much, the actors are mostly likable, the tone is appropriately silly (but not in a way where they're too knowing of it), and the climax is completely bananas as characters run through an unfinished building as the slasher/singer does his Rockabilly thing with his drill. It'd also be a total blast for a party movie night.
It's also a movie where if there even *is* a serial killer is in question since it could all be in the majorly PTSD'd, nightmare-riddled Courtney's mind. If the first movie was liberally borrowing (one might say ripping off but no, heavens no, that's not the Corman way is it?) from Halloween, then this is liberally borrowing from the Nightmare on Elm Street films (a scene of Courtney in a bath-tub seems like it was lifted so hard from the first one its ridiculous, and I almost thought it would oddly enough take from the third one, which came out the same year, but not quite the case), and at the heart of it is the most awesomely silly killer I've ever seen in a slasher.
Who is this killer? Try to imagine Quentin Tarantino hit his head on a sink and after he came to was tasked to write an 80's slasher movie - this is what he might come up with: Atanas Ilitch is having the time of his life playing this "Driller Killer", who would appear to be a psychological terror of Courtney's years after the first massacre happened, but is um... actually there? Is that a spoiler? The reasoning for why he finally leaps forward may actually make some sense is going by the usual (strict?) code of conduct for these kinds of movies - if you're a virgin, the moment you have sex is when you get it right through the vitals - and but in the moment it seems like it has only the slimmest rationale, and it fully becomes a "slasher", as in Ilitch's killer going after these innocent/obnoxious teens (some more than others), in the last act.
Before this is a lot of gloriously dumb scenes; at one point, the girls have an actual pillow fight and some/most of them take off their clothes to do so, and on that immediate beat two of the guys in the movie look on through a window and say, "they actually DO do this!" Again, the songs take up a good number of minutes (without them this might barely make a feature-length run-time), but they're not the worst ever, just that kind of mediocre 80's rock-pop that Corman was able to buy for 10 cents. The performances are also what you expect, but what makes the movie stand out a bit is that the filmmaker - once again a woman, and Corman was good about hiring women to make his movies, regardless of artistry, Deborah Brock in this case - tries to ape at times another Corman alumni, Jonathan Demme; there are multiple scenes where characters look directly at the camera as if to us and speak (for example when one of the teens finally calls the cops, prematurely really, when Courtney is having one of her hallucination/nightmare freak-outs). What is this supposed to do? I am sure I still don't know.
A lot of this is not good, and actually it's pretty terrible. What gives it the rating it gets is that it's a massively entertaining bad movie, one of those that sticks out among the multitudes of 80's slashers (and back then you could randomly throw a rock and hit a piece of s*** slasher movie); what is significant here is that the pace never slackens too much, the actors are mostly likable, the tone is appropriately silly (but not in a way where they're too knowing of it), and the climax is completely bananas as characters run through an unfinished building as the slasher/singer does his Rockabilly thing with his drill. It'd also be a total blast for a party movie night.