THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY
(1987,US)
   

"... where the girls are DYING for a good time."

If Ed Wood was still alive and making slasher flicks in the late 80s, he might have made something like THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY (but maybe I’m being unfair to old Ed) - a film so mind-bendingly awful that it transcends normal bad-movieness and takes off into uncharted realms of almost cosmic shittiness.

Imagine, if you will, take 2 parts HALLOWEEN, 3 parts SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, 1 part PORKIES, and then – for that extra special something – squat over a blender, strain, hit the on button: you’d be on the way to this epic milkshake of celluloid squits.

If you’ve seen the above-mentioned movies you probably won’t need to hear the ‘plot’, but just in case you’ve stumbled here from Disney.com I’ll give you a brief overview: High School is breaking up for Summer, and the ubiquitous bunch of over-aged slasher movie ‘teens’ have the usual things on their minds, “Three months of non-stop partying!”: booze; drugs; boys and heavy metal music so generic it makes Poison sound like Diamanda Galas. Three girls are planning a slumber party to celebrate: the virginal, Linda (Joann Whitley), whose house they are planning to sully; the ditzy, bleach blonde Tracy (Nancy Mayer), and Chrissie (Jan Jenson), who is seemingly genetically engineered from the Annie and Lynda characters in HALLOWEEN (1978). Then there’s the boys: chunky Scott (Paul Amend); goofy Tom (Danny David), and Ben Tramer, sorry, Billy (Lance Descourez), who they are going to set up with the virginal Linda. Then there’s Science (Rick Polizi), the class nerd who dresses in medical scrubs, and who everyone takes the piss out of. ... Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, across town, a psychotic patient escapes from an evidently not very high security asylum, dressed as a medic. To aid this, he stuffs some blankets under his sheets to make it look like he’s still sleeping there. This fools his doctor and nurse, which is no great surprise as given their performances they were self-medicating themselves to get through the production. It turns out that he’s hotfooted it because a full frontal lobotomy was on the menu. His nurse, through her horse tranquillizer haze, monotones to the equally lost looking doctor “He said he’d kill anyone who tried to cut out any of his brain!”. Whilst the dynamic duo stare into middle distance, our psychotic escapee (played with all the subtlety of a silent movie star by the director Steve Tyler) is skulking around the neighbourhood wearing surgical scrubs and a surgical mask, scalpel in hand, like he’s trying to recreate scenes from HOSPITAL MASSCARE (1982) (yet another film this gleefully rips off).

Now, it won’t come as a sucker punch to anyone but the most naïve viewer that the asylum and the gormless teens have something in common. It turns out that that Bemused MD is, in-fact, Linda’s father. The sins of the father and teenage slumber parties, naturally, don’t mix. Soon, the mad killer is gate crashing and all hell breaks loose (… if only!).

Perhaps ironically, the girls at the slumber party already seem to have had the lobotomy. The party itself is just a mind numbing cycle of eating, drinking, bitching and bad acting (sometimes all at the same time!). This is as exciting as it sounds.

For some reason known only to the director (did this have a cinematographer?) much of THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY seems to have been shot through 12 inches of KY Jelly. And what they spent on KY they skimped on the theatrical blood. The only ‘special’ effect in the movie involves one of those joke scalpels that squirts (a little bit of) blood out, being pulled slowly over the throats of the clearly bored cast.

There are so many things wrong with THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY that it’s a real embarrassment of dubious riches. Perhaps the most obvious is the music (and I use that term advisedly). The cock rock made my ears bleed and it look all my will not to hammer sharpened pencils into my abused eardrums. The cod disco sounded like a choir of angels in comparison, but nothing, absolutely nothing could prepare me for a synth ‘score’ that sounded like a hellish mix of bad gas and the Flock of Seagulls. Every time the killer appears on the screen the ‘composer’ sounds like he head butts the keyboard – and the rest of the time it’s clear he’s sitting astride a synthesiser, playing it with his butt cheeks. I would not be surprised in the least if they pipe this stuff into Guantánamo Bay.

THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY doesn’t throw any curve balls exactly, but it does, rather clumsily, throw a few spanners into the generic slasher framework. Introducing an extra killer was unexpected, but is handled with little aplomb (clearly, Tyler typed up the script with his butt cheeks, also), and ultimately goes nowhere. Plus, the choice of final girl admittedly goes against the grain – but these are cold comfort, really.

Bizarrely, in a subgenre not known for its political-correctness, THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY has to be one of the most homophobic slasher flicks ever made. The girls are seemingly obsessed with gay slurs against the boys (despite the fact they are constantly trying to get in their knickers). In one (admittedly funny) moment, when one of the boys vanishes, Chrissie moans, “He’s such a homo – he even took the bedspread!”.

The film does score some other cheese points for having the slumber party girls dancing around 70s wicker furniture to bad rock music. Plus, there’s a moment where a bloody body hangs next a Muppets poster! There’s also a bone-fide WFT moment when one of the characters has a bad cheese dream and thinks everyone is out to get her – it’s like Jean Cocteau fucking Andy Milligan.

The grand showdown (and, yes, I’m still using these terms advisedly) between the final girl and the killer is hardly show stopping stuff, but it does generate a few unintentional laughs. This final girl shows all the emotion of a plank being bitch slapped as she shuffles around the house, finding the bodies of her friends. Put it this way, she’s no Jamie Lee Curtis – and just frankly looks bored by the minimal bloodshed. In a hilarious moment, one character lurches into view grasping a gaping neck wound; rather than helping her the final girl sidesteps her in a bizarre slasher movie victim snub! Not the smartest cookie in the jar, this final girl mopes around the house and makes absolutely no attempt to escape – even when one of her friends springs back to life and tells her to get help!

The back of the box says that the film has ending that’ll take your breath away – it was almost right, I had to fight hard the urge to smother myself with a pillow. Tyler has the cheek to round off the film with what is perhaps the weakest twist ending in slasher movie history (think of the famous Bobby Ewing coming out of the shower scene in Dallas).

All-in-all, despite a modicum of cheese induced hilarity, THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY is about 6ft lower than the bottom of the barrel, and should be approached with caution by all but the most masochistic slasher movie fans and those with a cast iron gut for bad movies.

Finally, some sadist has put this out on one DVD with that other late 80s clunker, TERROR AT TENKILLER (1986). Pity the poor viewer who ever has the misfortune to suffer through that double bill!

BODYCOUNT 12     female:6 / male:6

       1) Female slashed to death with a scalpel
       2) Male has his throat cut with a scalpel
       3) Male has his throat cut with a scalpel
       4) Male slashed to death with a scalpel
       5) Female stabbed with butcher's knife
       6) Male has his throat cut with a scalpel
       7) Female has his throat cut with a scalpel
       8) Female stabbed in the back
       9) Female found with with throat cut
     10) Male stabbed in the chest with butcher's knife
     11) Male has his throat cut with a scalpel
     12) Female has his throat cut with a scalpel