One week after prom, the school year is over and three girlfriends decide to celebrate with a slumber party … The Last Slumber Party, if the scrubs-wearing maniac with surgical scalpel and frontal lobotomy has anything to say about it. (He so does.)
Despite strict parents who oppose boys and booze, Izod-clad good girl Linda (Joann Whitley) hosts the party for her two bitchy, sexually active friends who don’t seem all that friendly toward her: Tracy (Nancy Meyer) and Chris (Jan Jensen). You can tell these two apart because Tracy is blonde, while Chris is the redhead consistently grinding out the gay slurs — “faggot,” “homos” and “queerbait” being among her go-tos. In the less-PC 1980s, that kind of talk was standard vocab among young people, delivered without dripping in prejudice marinade; I believe this was the case here, too, since the shot-on-video movie is boneheaded in so many other departments as well.
Even lines lacking dirty talk remain crouched in dumbness, from “I’m going to the kitchen to munch out” and the twice-spoken “Let’s go rustle up some men folk” to the coup de grâce worth the price of admission, when Chris whines to someone on the other end of the phone line, “Who’d the hell you think it was, Shelley Hack?” That’s my pick for the most unquotable quotable line in a Z-grade movie, and trust me: Reading it is not the same thing as experiencing it. And this movie is an experience — granted, an experience for which most haven’t the fortitude, but that’s their problem.
Shot in the Louisiana suburbs by writer/director Stephen Tyler (who also plays the mute maniac and is not to be confused with Aerosmith walking corpse Steven Tyler), this 99 Cents Only Stores version of The Slumber Party Massacre feels less like a slasher movie and more like a loosely strung-together collection of its characters climbing in and out of the window of Linda’s room (notable for its Sesame Street poster) and/or walking up and down the stairs. The many scenes shot in that garishly wallpapered stairwell and adjoining hallway are so underlit and overgrained, you’d expect Andy Milligan to earn a credit as guest director. Tyler sure shares and exercises Milligan’s grasp on tension, which is to say one slathered in Astroglide. Fittingly, the monotonous score sounds as if Tyler’s cat walked across a synth and managed to hit “record.”
Actually, the whole of The Last Slumber Party reeks of that, down to its sudden, nonsensical ending. And more power to it. —Rod Lott