There I was, blowtorch in hand and standing behind the gate to a Canadian salmon canning factory that was really a front for a marsupial slaughterhouse. A burly guard stood on the other side and I figured my number was up.

“Are you the welder?” he asked. I nodded my head as he unlocked the gate and bade me inside. We made our way toward the factory and I braced myself for horrors.

— To be continued.

This week’s movie is 1987’s Slumber Party Massacre II from director Deborah Brock. I know I was a bit nonplussed regarding last week’s movie revolving around the escapades of the “driller killer,” an escaped maniac with a penchant for drilling his victims to death. After the events of the first movie, Valerie Bates ended up in a mental hospital after hacking the murderer up with a machete.

Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard), Valerie’s sister, is trying to move on with her life. She’s a member of an all girl rock n’ roll band. Her mom wants her to visit her sister at the mental hospital, but Courtney complains that it’s her birthday this weekend and that she just wants to hang out with her friends. Her mom apologizes for forgetting her birthday and gives her leave to go. I guess this wouldn’t be a Slumber Party Massacre movie without a proper slumber party.

The girls partake in eating corn dogs, topless pillow fighting, and drinking plenty of hard liquor. Courtney should be enjoying herself, but she is plagued by dreams of a rock’n’roll star (Atanas Ilitch) that drills people to death with his guitar. In other words, a drill pokes out of his guitar so he’ll kill you right after he treats you to some rockabilly.

Courtney’s ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality begins to shatter throughout her stay. When she’s handed a hamburger with lots of ketchup, Courtney sees not a hamburger, but a bloody severed hand in a bun! Yikes! She’s handed a chicken sandwich and all is right again. Later that day, one of her friends who has been complaining about her acne has now turned into a giant pimple. The pimple ruptures and Courtney gets doused in green puss.

Throughout this, Courtney’s dreams about the rockabilly driller killer intensify. Her boyfriend, Matt (Patrick Lowe), brings her a birthday cake and it’s a beautiful romantic gesture until the rockabilly driller killer appears and sends his drill right through Matt’s chest. What follows is a free-for-all as this maniac kills off Courtney’s friends one by one. I have to admit. He does it with serious style. There’s a predictable twist ending, but it fits so let’s not nitpick.

While watching this movie, one thing made me uncomfortable. All the fashion and the hair styles are reflective of trends from the late 80s, early 90s. That’s my preteen years and they seem as dated now as flappers and Zoot suits. Yet, for some reason, I can’t resist the pressure to buy some day-glow fashion.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #389 by Jeff Shuster

Slumber Party Massacre

Was Herschel Gordon Lewis involved in this?

I was under orders from the Canadian government to infiltrate an illegal marsupial slaughtering operation. I encountered an obstacle in the form of a chain link fence with a locked gate. I took out my blowtorch and set the white hot flame to the padlock in hopes of melting it away, but it was taking forever.

I was so transfixed waiting for the lock to turn into molten goo that I didn’t notice the security guard standing on the other side of the fence. — To be continued.

This week’s movie is 1982’s Slumber Party Massacre from director Amy Holden Jones. It’s a slasher movie I’ve somehow missed all of these years. Maybe I confused it with The House on Sorority Row. That was the movie where one of the co-eds found a severed head in the toilet. Good times!

Slumber Party Massacre begins with a late breaking report about an escaped maniac named Russ Thorn (Michael Villella) who uses a power drill to slay his victims. One wonders how these mass murderers always manage to escape and how quiet suburban communities never seem to take these maniac situations very seriously. For instance, Russ manages to stop by the local high school and murder a teacher and a student with no one ever noticing he’s there.

Slumber Party Massacre indeed has a slumber party. Trish Deveraux (Michelle Michaels), a high school senior, invites a bunch of her friends over for a night of food, frolicking, weed, and booze. Yup. They’re going to get high and liquored up because that’s what you do when your parents are out of town. Trish also invites the new girl, Valerie (Robin Stille), to the party, but she declines as Trish’s friends hate Valerie because she’s too pretty.

Trish’s parents left a neighbor in charge of keeping an eye on Trish and her friends, but he’s too busy trying to kill night snails. Russ drills him to death, as Russ is want to do. Meanwhile, Valerie babysits her bratty younger sister, Courtney. They’re reading magazines, which is what people did before the Internet. Courtney even sneaks a copy of her sister’s Playgirl magazine. I’m sure she reads it for the articles.

There are a couple of horn-dogs named Jeff and Neil who stop by the slumber party to ogle the girls. Trish lets them inside in a ploy to get them to pay for the pizza. The pizza guy shows up, Jeff and Neil gather up the cash, open the door, and the pizza guy falls over due to his eyes being drilled out through the back of his head. Panic ensues as this slumber party realizes a psychopath is on the prowl.

The girls get Jeff and Neil to leave and get help. Why didn’t they call for help? Because Russ cut the phone lines. It doesn’t take Jeff and Neil long to get butchered despite them heading in different directions. And then Russ goes to town on the young women. Don’t worry. There will be a final girl that hacks Russ up. I liked last week’s movie better. It had inbred hillbillies as the murderers. You can’t just give some random guy a power drill and expect him to be the next Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. Fail.

The Curator of Schlock #388 by Jeff Shuster

Just Before Dawn

Stay away from psychotic hillbillies.

I was working with a Canadian secret agent named Larry. Together, we planned to infiltrate a factory where they slaughtered and canned kangaroos and other marsupials. Larry charged me with freeing the animals while he distracted the guards. He gave me a box cutter and a blowtorch. I was to sneak through the back while he created a diversion.

He showed me some factory blueprints and I pretended to understand, but honestly, who really knows how to read those things?

This week’s movie is 1981’s Just Before Dawn from director Jeff Lieberman. It’s a slasher movie and I’ve been known to cover slasher movies every now and then on this blog. I keep thinking I’m going to run out of these films, but there seems to be an endless supply of them. I guess the bulk were made between 1979 and 1982, probably trying to capitalize on the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Our movie begins with two tipsy hunters named Ty (Mike Kellin) and Vachel (Charles Bartlett) goofing around in an abandoned church somewhere in the Oregon wilderness. Ty is getting liquored up something fierce when he sees a creepy hillbilly staring down at him through a hole in the roof. When he calls Vachel over, the crazed hillbilly has disappeared. Must have been the alcohol. I’m a little fuzzy on what happens next, but I believe Vachel gets disemboweled and Ty runs for his life.

Next we get a bunch of rowdy college students riding along in their RV blasting Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Driving the vehicle is Warren (Gregg Henry) who apparently inherited a lot of land up in the wilds of Oregon. The guy even owns a mountain. I wish I owned a mountain. Anyway, these crazy kids are ready for a weekend of camping, skinny dipping, and drunken frivolity. A forest ranger played by George Kennedy warns them not to go up in those hills, but those “damn, fool kids never learn.” Did you know George Kennedy starred in a made-for-tv movie where he tussled with a rabid skunk?

Good times!

Warren and his friends run into a drunken Ty who warns them about a demon up in those hills. Ty begs the kids to take him away from there, but they refuse, toss him a couple of sandwiches, and drive off. As they pull away, the maniacal hillbilly donning Vachel’s hunting vest, hops on the back of the van. Ty laughs at their impending doom.

Warren has a girlfriend named Constance (Deborah Benson), the nice and normal one who will probably end up being the “final girl” when all is said and done. There are brothers Jonathan (Chris Lemmon) and Daniel (Ralph Seymour), one of whom is a jokester. Jonathan’s girlfriend is along for the ride too, a redhead with an obsession with makeup and nail polish.

Just Before Dawn is a slow burn. Not one of the college students get murdered the first night. You can’t say they don’t get plenty of warning. Warren learns that he’s a landlord as there are people living up in the mountains and inbreeding may have been taking place over the years. Constance gets a moment at the end of the movie where she confronts the killer and it’s something to behold.

It reminds me of how I was told once to kill a lion if I ever ran into one.