The Party is Pleasant

Women in their 20s playing teenagers gather at night while an insane serial killer is on the loose. You can guess what happens next in 1982's Slumber Party Massacre, a slasher film in the heyday of slasher films. This one bears the distinction of being written, directed, and produced by women and, perhaps for this reason, there's no coyness or nervous energy about its titillating elements. That is nice and the film is altogether easy to watch but ultimately it may be a little too comfortable. It never manages to generate a real sense of anxiety or any especially exciting sexual energy.

Originally conceived as a feminist parody of the slasher genre by screenwriter Rita Mae Brown, it was made into a more sincere horror film by director/producer Amy Holden Jones. It retains a post-modern, tongue-in-cheek quality signaled immediately in the first scene of the protagonist, Trish (Michelle Michaels), waking up at home. She's listening to a radio show in which a woman winning a contest asks how much money the prize is--and replies with an angry, "What?!" when she's informed that the prize is a free t-shirt.

Later, during the titular slumber party, the only scene of guys peeping at girls is constructed with deliberate artificiality. Moments after the two guys approach the open window, the girls immediately gather into easy view and start undressing. The window frame emphasises the self-awareness of the film as a film designed for men to enjoy. As usual for post-modernism, what may have been intended as profound or intelligent is really just redundant. Yep, we're watching a movie, all right.

The killer, with the obviously significant name of "Russ Thorn" (Michael Villella), gets an obviously phallic weapon, a power drill. He's a particularly weak villain--the actor is never very expressive but he's never inexpressive enough to be a creepy Michael Myers type.

Trish starts the film by throwing away some dolls, obviously a symbolic coming of age gesture to which the film is obviously responding with the hideous rite of passage of an encounter with demented masculinity. But the film's heart is in the right place, putting a clear dividing line between healthy sexual play--such as the gratuitous nudity in a slasher film--and the mental aberration of a man whose fetish involves genuine harm to women. It's a shame the film couldn't manage to be as exciting as it was evidently game for being.

The Slumber Party Massacre is available on Shudder.

No Innocent Babes, Ellie and Myra

No-one among the ensemble in 1972's Bonnie's Kids is really innocent but sometimes some of them get worse than they deserve. A fascinating exploitation film, and obvious influence on Quentin Tarantino, it's a pulpy kaleidoscope of sex, crime, bad acting, and the underbelly of Los Angeles.

Two beautiful sisters, Ellie (Tiffany Bolling) and Myra (Robin Mattson), live with their impressively skeevy stepfather (Leo Gordon). We meet him with his poker buddies who all seem to be the same kind of skeevy, beefy middle-aged men. Myra, the younger of the two girls, is an endlessly fascinating little psychopath. But she's also a kid--arguably like one of those kids who burns ants with magnifying glasses whose worse nature is exacerbated by circumstances. She aggressively flirts with her stepfather's poker buddies and he doesn't take kindly to it--not, as we soon learn, entirely out of a sense of paternal affection.

When Ellie discovers the old man trying to rape Myra, she blasts him with a shotgun and the two girls run off to L.A. This is only the first few minutes of the film. It sets a pattern of splashy, dovetailing situations, each with its own set of moral ambiguities.

The girls go to stay with their wealthy uncle Ben Siemen (Scott Brady)--pronounced like semen--who has a lucrative business in pornography. His wife, Diana (Lenore Stevens), is a good hearted, repressed lesbian who might be the only spotless character in the film so she's not around long. The callousness with which she's treated by some of the other characters helps to confirm their sadism.

Ellie falls in with a dirty detective named Larry (Steve Sandor) and the two embark on a scheme to rob some L.A. mobsters. The possible prototypes of Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction are on their tail for much of the film, a pair of hitmen played by former football player Timothy Brown and Alex Rocco--Moe Greene from The Godfather and easily the best actor in Bonnie's Kids.

The film continually defies any attempt to see a good guy or a bad guy but you can't help pulling for one character or another depending on the circumstance. There's certainly a noir quality in the existential problem presented by the film; how guilty are these characters, really, and how much are they creatures born of circumstance? Larry directly references Double Indemnity in conversation but I was reminded more of The Big Sleep when it comes to Ellie and Myra. Much like the sisters Carmen and Vivian, one of them is young and cruel and the other is cagey and worldly. Of course, Ellie and Myra aren't as fortunate as the Sternwood girls, which might account for them being ten times as mercenary.

The film has terrific style. Even the bad actors look smashing in a distinctively carnal way.

Bonnie's Kids is available for free to Amazon Prime subscribers in a surprisingly well restored HD print. I understand it was for decades quite a difficult film to find.