Dissecting Slashers: The Last Slumber Party (1988)

Cutting into an amusingly bad slasher movie.

BACKGROUND

Stephen Tyler was 13 years old when he caught a theatrical screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey during its initial release in 1968 – and as that movie’s 149 minute running time played out, Tyler’s life was changed. When he left the theatre, he left with dreams of becoming a filmmaker. When he went off to college in 1973, he started making Super 8 shorts, building up to the day when he would have the chance to direct his own feature film. It took several years, but he finally got there – and since it was the 1980s when he started working on his feature debut, he decided to cash in on the slasher movie craze of the time.

As Tyler worked on the script for the film The Last Slumber Party, he was drawing some inspiration from the works of Brian De Palma, particular Dressed to Kill and Carrie – but what really comes across in the finished movie is the influence of John Carpenter’s Halloween... so much that The Last Slumber Party has probably been called a Halloween rip-off by a lot of people who have seen it.

Tyler has admitted that the script was “almost embarrassingly derivative.” But, he was still eager to bring it to the screen. So eager that he started production (graduating from 8mm to 16mm film in the process) when he only had around six to seven thousand dollars for the budget, although an investor had promised him five thousand more. That extra five grand was never delivered, but Tyler and his cast and crew pushed through anyway, with the cast and crew agreeing to waive the minimum wage payments they had previously been promised.

Filming lasted for five or six weeks – but there are disagreements between Tyler and cast members as to whether the filming took place in 1981 or 1984. Set decorations include posters of the Bee Gees, Xanadu, Tom Selleck, Sesame Street characters, John Travolta in Urban Cowboy, and The Beatles, not of which provide an answer to what year filming was taking place. The Xanadu and Urban Cowboy posters could be a year old or four years old, Selleck’s show Magnum, P.I. ran from 1980 to ‘88, so that poster would be in style for almost the whole decade.

Whenever it was filmed, it didn’t end up being released until 1988.

SETTING

Filming took place in Metairie, Louisiana, which is just outside of New Orleans. Although there were some scenes filmed in a hospital (possibly one Tyler was working in at the time), a high school, and a convenience store, the majority of the film takes place in one location: the home of the Sickler family, where a trio of teen girls have decided to have a slumber party – with hopes that some boys will be able to sneak in as the night goes on. Several boys do... unfortunately, some of them happen to be armed with bladed objects.

The name of the town within the movie isn’t clear, because we hear multiple different possibilities: there’s the Hillcrest police force, Oakridge Memorial Hospital, and Northside High School. I guess we’ll just say it’s Metairie.

The Sickler house is a nice place, which isn’t to say all of its rooms are pleasant to look at in the film. There is some ugly wallpaper and an oddly placed Budweiser light hanging right over the dining table – but owners with a better eye for interior design could easily improve it and turn it into something special. The home actually belonged to someone Tyler went to school with, said to be the older brother of a local political figure. Production was built around the family’s schedule and the work schedules of cast members, so cast and crew would show up at the house in the evening and film all night. The family who lived in the house would often be upstairs when the cast and crew were downstairs, and vice versa. Some scenes were shot in rooms right next to rooms where people were sleeping.

Eventually, the family got tired of having movie-makers in them home and said they needed to wrap it up. But, the movie-makers came back a few months later to spend a few days trying to cobble together an ending. Or several endings, as we see in the finished film. Some of the final moments were made up on the fly, which is quite obvious because they don’t make much sense.

KILLER

When you’re ripping off Halloween, you have to have an escaped maniac of some sort. In this case, we have Stephen Tyler himself playing a character who’s credited as the Maniac, but we also hear that his name is Mr. Randals at one point. The Maniac is in the care of Dr. Sickler because he’s a paranoid schizophrenic who’s prone to bouts of such intense violence that he’s scheduled to be given a lobotomy. The Maniac doesn’t appreciate the idea of getting his brain scrambled, so he steals scrubs, a surgical mask, and a scalpel, breaks out of the hospital, and makes his way over to Sickler’s home, planning to kill the doctor, his family, and anyone else who might be around.

The Maniac isn’t the only killer in the film, though. Some of the characters bully a nerdy classmate they called Science (Rick Polizzi), who sets out to get some violent revenge. Our final girl also manages to accidentally kill an innocent person.

But the Maniac is the main focus here, and he’s presented in a really goofball way, popping into frame and staring into the camera. He’s supposed to be a terrifying killer, but there are some hilarious moments when he shows up.

FINAL GIRL 

Given the Halloween influence, viewers will likely expect Linda Sickler (Joann Whitley) to be the final girl. She’s the meek good girl of her friend group; her pals Tracy (Nancy Meyer) and Chris (Jan Jensen) know her parents will let her have a slumber party because she never does anything wrong. The Sicklers have no guys and no drinking rules in place, but those both go out the window very quickly. They’re suckers for letting Linda have Tracy and Chris over – and Tyler also pulls a fast one on viewers, because Linda is not the final girl. One of her party girl friends is.

Tyler made some odd decisions, and one was the choice to have Tracy and Chris behave like the girls who tormented Carrie White in De Palma’s Stephen King adaptation Carrie (Chris even shares a name with the worst of Carrie’s bullies). These girls are hardcore bitches; highly irritable people who start off treating people like they’re on their last nerve and get worse from there. The insults and homophobic slurs fly fast and furious – and Chris is the worst, nastiest one of the pair, so it’s surprising when we figure out that she’s actually the one we’re going to be following all the way to the end credits.

Jensen came out of the theatre world and didn’t want to go too big with her screen acting – but she held back too much. When Chris starts finding corpses, she barely reacts. As Jensen put it, she looks like she’s reacting to dropping a penny when she’s looking at the dead bodies of her friends. Tyler said some of the awkwardness with the Chris character is due to the fact that he had written the role for his girlfriend, who had a quirkiness to her that would have made the scripted lines work better if they had been spoken by her instead of Jensen. But he and his girlfriend decided there would be too much friction if he were to direct her in the lead role in his movie, so she took a lesser role and Jensen got the lead.

It’s difficult to imagine that Chris could ever come off as anything other than nasty. She is one of the all-time strangest final girls. A foul-mouthed party girl who ends up walking around in her Vikings jersey (loaned to her from the director’s personal wardrobe), barely reacting to deaths, and stabbing the wrong people.

VICTIMS

As mentioned, Linda and Tracy are both victims. So is Mrs. Sickler (Barbara Claiborne), who spends most of the movie just trying to get some sleep – when she’s not worrying that her husband, Dr. Sickler (David Whitley) might have an affair with one of the nurses he works with. She’s right to be concerned, because we see that the nurses are, in fact, lusting after the guy, even though he has all the charisma of a cardboard box. It’s worth noting that while David Whitley plays the father of Joann Whitley’s Linda, David and Joann were actually married in real life (and if you look closely, there doesn’t appear to be a significant age gap).

Marilouise Michel plays a nurse who considers having an affair with Dr. Sickler and becomes the first kill in the movie. Michel was initially cast as Chris (after Tyler’s girlfriend, who might have been Michel’s fellow nurse actress Darcy Devine, took herself out of consideration but before Jan Jensen got involved), but she needed to step back, so Tyler gave her the role of the first victim instead.

A random, sleepy orderly sitting on a park bench gets killed, and Science’s rampage of revenge doesn’t last very long. Also on the body count are “super hunk” Tommy (Danny David), who has been going out with Chris, even though they treat each other like trash; Tommy’s delinquent buddy Billy (Lance Descourez), who’s hooking up with Tracy; and the dimwitted Scott (Paul Amend), who Chris and Tracy really want to hook up with Linda, even though Linda isn’t enthusiastic about the idea.

Some of these people barely register as characters, and those who do usually don’t come off very well.

DEATHS

Most of the murders are committed with scalpels, and given the low budget of the movie, it’s not a shock to see that there aren’t any elaborate special effects involved in the death scenes. There are five throat slashings. Some characters get slashed across the face. Some receive their fatal wounds off screen, then come stumbling up to survivors. There are also a couple of stabbings – the accidental kill that I’ve mentioned being committed by Chris, and an intentional one. By the time the end credits roll, you might be wondering if any of the murders even happened at all, thanks to the messy made-up-on-the-spot ending(s).

CLICHÉS

For clichés, we have the escaped maniac going after party girls and party dudes who fill their time with booze and weed. There are bullies and pranksters. There’s the boyfriend sneaking in the window scene and the “cat jumping out of the closet” moment, which is quickly followed by the sight of a hidden corpse falling into view for no apparent reason. (And that falling corpse happens to pull aside some of the clothes in the closet, revealing the crew member who let the cat go.) 

It all wraps up with the “did it happen, or was it a dream?” cliché, which I tend to really hate, outside of The Wizard of Oz.

POSTMORTEM

Once Stephen Tyler had the film edited together, he sold it off to a home video company for a price less than $10,000 – so it’s quite lucky (depending on how you look at it) that the film still endures in some way. Not only did it get VHS distribution, but it has also made its way into the digital age and even caught the attention of the guys at Rifftrax, who gave it a deserved mocking. The people who bought the movie from Tyler did some tinkering with in, making some nonsensical additions like shots of a clock, putting the horror movie Forever Evil on the TV the girls are watching, and giving it a rocking theme song by the metal band Firstryke. It would be difficult to mess the movie up, because it was already a mess when they got it.

Jensen says that Tyler took the production very seriously. She said, “He was very sensitive about having any fun with the movie at the time. This was his auteur moment.” He was trying to reach the level of Alfred Hitchcock in the ‘80s, but she hoped he developed a sense of humor about the movie as the decades went on.

Tyler, on the other hand, claims that he’s “in on the joke” and always was. That said, he also gave a recommendation: “Set aside one night to watch, back to back, Plan 9 from Outer Space and Citizen Kane. The Last Slumber Party falls somewhere in between. I pray that, even if it’s just incrementally, my film is closer on this spectrum to Citizen Kane.” That quote would seem to indicate that he’s not as “in on the joke” as he claimed to be, because The Last Slumber Party definitely ranks down there in the Bad Movie Hall of Fame with Plan 9 from Outer Space (which, despite its reputation, is far from being the “worst movie ever made”).

The Last Slumber Party is pretty terrible, a rather inept attempt at making a slasher... but I have to congratulate Tyler for making a movie that still gets talked about 40 years later, even if it’s talked about because it’s so bad that it’s amusing. Making a low budget movie that gets distribution and sticks around for decades is a hell of an accomplishment.

It took another decade-plus, but Tyler apparently did make another feature: a one-hour drama called Fasuna to Chibusa, co-directed by Koji Shirakawa. That was probably meant to be more impressive and more high-brow than The Last Slumber Party, but it didn’t get noticed the way his bad slasher movie has.