Director: Amy Holden Jones
Year: 1982
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
With her parents gone for the weekend, a teenager decides to invite her friends over after school for a slumber party, but after a few weird occurrences around the house are revealed to be the work of a serial killer on the loose and stalking them they try to survive the night with help from their next-door neighbor.
Review:
This is one of the best slashers from the time-period. One of the strongest aspects here is that it has everything that slasher fans need in a good movie even though it features the entire movie taking place in a woman's house with the kills taking place around the house. There are quite a few good kills once they arrive at the party, with one getting their eyes drilled out, another is stabbed in the stomach with a power drill, a slashed neck, and another is decapitated among plenty of others from the generally high body-count on display. Given that this one decides to open up knowing who he is from the beginning and relying on the shock appearance of where he’ll come out next. The deaths are seen coming a mile away, but he then switches his aim and picks someone else off that wasn't who the audience thought was the target of the attack which is a great twist.
Also enjoyable here is the stand-out attempts to provide stalking and confrontations with the killer. The opening scene through the school, where the student who has to retrieve a book left in her gym locker finds all the doors have been locked upon trying to leave the building and comes across the killer and forcing her to run in a very long chase through the girls' gym is believable since what happens could actually happen to a person if they were chased by a maniac in a building where they knew the location and the maniac didn't. The majority of the scenes around the party work the same way, from knocking off the boyfriends in the garage to the couple leaving for extra food or the even the chase over to the neighbors house where it gets her concerned about the noise across the street also make use of the other fun aspects involved here featuring great kills, a unique setting and great atmosphere.
The other bit that works here is the highly enjoyable chasing and stalking that occurs once the girls are aware of the killer at the party, from the early scenes of the girls who will stumble upon a dead body, the special arrival of the delivery-person who alerts them to the killers’ presence and some of the stalking around the house trying to get away only to inadvertently run into him. The standout sequence of the killer chasing several victims upstairs who escape the killer and barricade themselves inside preventing him from entering, and after waiting for several moments with no apparent evidence that he's there let down their guard only to then switch to her window on the other side of the room showing him entering through the window with the girls completely oblivious to his presence. He gets right up on them before he creaks the floor, alerting them to the fact that he's literally breathing on their necks, forcing them to run. It’s a special sequence, and really holds this one up overall.
There aren’t too many flaws with this one. The most obvious issue is that it's far too short. It barely lasts over an hour, and with the end credits it reaches an hour and fifteen minutes. It could've been expanded a little more, with maybe more emphasis on what they are doing at the slumber party. They are there for what seems like a long time, but nothing happens and most of it is split between the party and the neighbors arguing whether her sister should go or not so they needed to bump that up some more and give a more traditional sense of slumber party antics than what we got here. The other issue is the inhumanely unscary killer who’s completely non-threatening, running around barely taller than the girls in here and looking like a regular dude who’s wearing a Canadian tuxedo, making for a wholly disappointing killer. These are what hold this one down.
Overview: ****.5/5
With a bit more running time to build off the positives on display, this could be more than one of the best slashers to come from this time period. As it stands, this is still something most single red-blooded males will want to see with the blood and nudity, and all 80's slasher fans will definitely like this one, while only those who don’t enjoy those kinds of efforts will be turned off by this one.
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