Film Appreciation - Don't Go All the Way

Cody Hamman sings the praises of Slumber Party Massacre II for Film Appreciation.

As far as I'm concerned, Slumber Party Massacre II is one of the best sequels ever made - and that's largely because it's also one of the most ridiculous sequels ever made.

Directed by Amy Holden Jones from a screenplay by Rita Mae Brown, 1982's The Slumber Party Massacre had been a rather straightforward Halloween knock-off about an escaped murderer getting his hands on a power drill and crashing a teen girl's slumber party. The neighbor girls, siblings Courtney and Valerie, got mixed up in the mayhem as well, and it was Valerie who brought the killing spree to an end, taking the murderer down with a machete while her younger sister Courtney watched. Five years later, Deborah Brock was tasked with writing and directing a follow-up to that film, and I'm very glad the sequel ended up in her hands, because nobody else would have or could have made a Slumber Party Massacre II like she did.

 

When we catch up with Courtney Bates (now played by Crystal Bernard) in this one, she's in high school and her sister Valerie (Cindy Eilbacher) has been in a mental hospital ever since the events of the previous movie. In one of the early scenes Mrs. Bates (Jennifer Rhodes) suggests that she and Courtney should go visit Valerie that weekend, and Courtney rejects that idea with one of the most popular lines from the film, "Sunday's my birthday and I don't wanna go to a mental hospital!" Instead, Courtney wants to spend the weekend with her friends Amy (Kimberly McArthur), Sheila (Juliette Cummins), and Sally (Heidi Kozak). Sheila's dad has just bought a new condo in the housing development near the Desert Springs golf course, which requires a bit of a road trip to get to, and the girls are planning a weekend getaway.

Making the "slumber party weekend" plans even more important to Courtney is the fact that she has invited her crush Matt (Patrick Lowe) to join them at the condo, since Sheila's boyfriend T.J. (Joel Hoffman) and Amy's boyfriend Jeff (Scott Westmoreland) are already going to be there anyway. Matt won't be able to get there until Saturday afternoon, but he will be there eventually, and Courtney hopes they'll be hooking up when he arrives.

Courtney, Amy, Sheila, and Sally are all in a band together and practice out of Amy's garage. They perform two songs in the film, "Why" and "If Only", both of them provided by a band called Wednesday Week, and this is part of one of my favorite things about the movie, the music. There is a substantial musical element to Slumber Party Massacre II - the girls' practicing and performing; a sing-along to a song called "Tokyo Convertible"; a corndogs-and-champagne-fueled dance and pillow fight sequence (with gratuitous nudity) to "Hell's Cafe"; a rockabilly theme song called "Don't Let Go" (which was the film's working title); and then there's the sequel's version of the drill-wielding killer.

The killer is a supernatural force that emerges from Courtney's subconscious. She is plagued by nightmares, and in these nightmares she envisions a man dressed in leather clothes and cowboy boots, holding an elaborate guitar that has a large drill at the end of the neck, replacing the headstock. Since Courtney is in a band, music is obviously a big part of her life, and it seems her subconscious has mashed her musical passion together with the horrible events she went through in The Slumber Party Massacre. So now she's haunted by the image of a rocker with a drill guitar. I doubt anyone other than Deborah Brock ever would have come up with that concept for Slumber Party Massacre II.

As the film goes on, Courtney's nightmares become more and more intense, and she even has strange hallucinations in the middle of the day. She imagines there's a bloody hand in between the buns of her ketchup-soaked hamburger, she opens the refrigerator and thinks she's being attacked by a raw chicken, and when Sally mentions having a pimple Courtney imagines that she has a massive, deforming zit that proceeds to pop and spray Courtney with yellow pus. Some of that pus even gets in Courtney's mouth, it's really disgusting.

In her nightmares, Courtney sees Valerie warning her, "Don't go all the way." I remember the first time I saw this movie, rented on VHS. I probably would have been around 4 or 5 years old, but I was already a big horror fan, but I was a little horror fan who didn't know what "Don't go all the way" meant. I asked my mom, and she didn't give me the real answer. She said Valerie was warning Courtney not to go all the way to the condo, that she should turn around and go home. Of course, that's not what Valerie means. After Courtney has had a rough day plagued with hallucinations, Matt sweetly presents her with a birthday cake, consoles her and says he understands that helping kill a murderer is "a really heavy trip", and then they prepare to have sex. It looks like Courtney is going to lose her virginity on her birthday.

 

And once Courtney begins to "go all the way", that's when the rock 'n roll driller killer enters the real world and starts killing her friends. 51 minutes of this 76 minute movie go by before the killing begins, but once the Driller Killer arrives at the condo, it is so worth the wait. Played by Atanas Ilitch, this guy is a riot. He's a cackling maniac with a tendency to drop quips (or lines from classic songs), which is something that usually annoys me very quickly, but I don't get annoyed by this Driller Killer. I have a lot of fun watching him, and wish he had been brought back for another sequel. Or more sequels. This guy deserves a franchise!

My favorite thing about this Driller Killer is that he stops in the middle of pursuing people to strum his guitar, or to perform an entire song like he's in a music video. While Sheila is running for her life, the Driller Killer is singing a song called "Let's Buzz" and dancing around in the condo. This scene brings me great joy.

The killer doesn't stop to sing it, but another portion of the climactic chase sequence is set to the song "Can't Stop (Lovin' You)". I would usually disagree with the choice of putting a song over a chase in a slasher movie, but here, for this particular slasher movie, it's absolutely perfect.

Atanas Ilitch's The Driller Killer is incredible, and it benefits the film that he goes after a cast I really like. A few years after this film, Crystal Bernard went on to co-star in the sitcom Wings, a childhood favorite of mine. Heidi Kozak of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood and Society is always great to see in anything, and she can usually be counted on for some unique line deliveries. Joel Hoffman is hilarious as the braindead "Valley dude" T.J. Kimberly McArthur has a likeable screen presence that leaves me wishing she had been in more movies. Scott Westmoreland and Patrick Lowe do fine work in their roles... And then there's Juliette Cummins, whose work in this film, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, Psycho III, and Deadly Dreams made her one of my favorite genre regulars of the '80s. She's a lot of fun in this movie, playing the wild child of the bunch.

I can see why some viewers would be put off by Slumber Party Massacre II, how they could go from watching the first movie and have a "what the hell is this?" reaction to this sequel, because it is an absurd movie. But its goofy tone, musical interludes, and thoroughly '80s style work for me in a major way. This movie has had a place in my heart and mind ever since that first viewing when I was a little kid, and my love and appreciation for it has only grown as the years and decades have gone by. For me, this is 76 minutes of pure entertainment.

You say 'Why?'

I say 'Because'

Let's buzz!