FINAL GIRL explores the slasher flicks of the '70s and '80s...and all the other horror movies I feel like talking about, too. This is life on the EDGE, so beware yon spoilers!

Jan 11, 2006

How Fitting.

How absolutely fitting that I was in the middle of a my post about The Last Slumber Party (1987) when it disappeared. Poof. Just like that. How was it fitting? Well, I was in the middle of a sentence declaring this movie the biggest pile of crap I've ever seen. The same evil force that made me buy The Last Slumber Party obviously doesn't want me talking smack about it either, and therefore made me click 'ok' at the wrong moment, sending my rant into the foul netherworld from whence it came. The Patron Saint of Giant Shitpiles Caught on Tape, meddling again, I guess. Sigh. I will try again, because I honestly believe that this movie is so bad, that if I can spew enough bile about it and maybe I can prevent just one more person from seeing it, then I will have accomplished some sort of mission in my life. You know I love a so-bad-it's-good movie. This movie, though...this movie...I think I may make it a personal goal to buy every copy of this movie in existence. Then I will load all the copies into a big box truck, haul them out to the New Mexico desert, where I will commence burying them in a big hole next to all those Atari ET game cartridges. Before I bury them, however, I will dump my dirty cat box on them and flip them off with both hands just to show them some more hate.

I think the plot was something like this: some girls are having a slumber party. The father of the girl hosting the party is a doctor at a mental hospital. One of his patients escapes, comes to the house, and kills everybody.

I say "I think" because I couldn't hear the dialogue for the first 10 or so minutes of the movie, either because the sound was simply so poor or because there was music drowning it out altogether. Yes, lame metal music by "Firstryke" just played and played and played while people talked about something. You know, it doesn't even matter that I heard nothing, because what I did hear made virtually no sense at all. The writing and direction in this flick were the absolute worst I've ever seen in any movie. Ever. Evvvvaaaaaaaaar. There were jump cuts, characters inexplicably winding up in entirely different locations from one scene to the next...long, lingering shots that went far beyond long and lingering...I can't describe accurately how bad it was. It's far beyond my feeble grasp on language to do so. Take this shot, for example:

It's one of the "I'm 'in high school' but I look like a 40-year-old crack whore" characters in the shower. This shot, with a little zoom in and a little zoom out and a little shitty synthesizer noise, goes on for well over a minute. I timed it. I want you to stare at that picture while saying "beep beep beep" over and over for a minute and ten seconds, so you can feel my pain. A minute is alot longer than you'd think. A minute is a very long time in hell, indeed.

The writing is second to the directing in general crappiness only because the characters manage to speak in complete sentences. The same sentences, over and over and over, but complete sentences, at least. If I had to hear "You scared the shit outta me!" when nothing had happened one more time...pow! Zoom! To the fucking moon with this dvd, off the end of my foot! Here are some choice names for the boys used repeatedly throughout the movie: queer, queerbait, faggot, homo. And for the ladies: bitch, whore, wench. I don't even know the character names.

Judging from the beginning, I thought the movie was going to try to rip off Halloween alot more than it actually did. Check out this shot:

Remind you of anything? Laurie, Annie, and Lynda (Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, PJ Soles) walking home, having some 'girl talk' maybe? And the one in the middle there is the 'nerdy' one...her girlfriends are gonna set her up with a guy, despite her protests! Yeah, just like the whole Ben Tramer bit in Halloween. Had it continued the blatant rip-offs and been a 5th-rate Halloween, The Last Slumber Party would've been a much better movie then what it actually is.

Want to feel like you were there with me? Stare at this for a minute or two:

Yes, an action news flash that's just a poorly dubbed voiceover accompanying a lame graphic. It's actually one of the more exciting shots in the movie.

The killer, dressed in surgical scrubs, kills everyone the same way: by drawing a red line across their throats with a scalpel. Then he bugs out his eyes and holds the scalpel up to the camera for thirty seconds or so. Why, I don't know. But he does it...over...and over...and over...

You know, if I were me (wait, I am me) and I were reading this exact same review, I might think "Well, yeah, but I like bad movies- I'm gonna check this one out!". I might check it out, and later I would kick myself in the ass so hard I'd never see my Buster Browns again. I do like bad movies, of a type. Not this type. Please, readers, please...stay away from The Last Slumber Party. Stay as far away as possible. I really took one for the team by watching this. I suffered so you don't have to- that's how much I care. Take my word for it. Look- even Tom Selleck hates this movie!

See how unhappy he is, despite the bug-eyed killer? If Tom Selleck can't enjoy it, then how can we mere mortals expect to?

I feel a bit like this review is a jumbled mess- sort of all over the place and garbled. If you find it that way, too, then again, I say- how fitting. Because The Last Slumber Party is a big garbled mess that makes no fucking sense. I give it one quarter out of 10 stuck up middle fingers. You know why it didn't get a zero? Because at some point, one of the characters said "Who'd you think it was, Shelley Hack?" and any movie that name-drops Shelley Hack deserves one quarter of something. Otherwise, I hate you, The Last Slumber Party! F you and the dvd you rode in on!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very cool review as always :) "You know, if I were me (wait, I am me) and I were reading this exact same review, I might think "Well, yeah, but I like bad movies- I'm gonna check this one out!". Hehhe, perfect, I thought the same before getting to this piece of info, I WILL stay away from it, I'll maybe watch Slumber Party Massacre part 2 once again ;)) The horror...

Anonymous said...

Holy hell. I thought that I was the only person on earth who had seen this piece of crap. So it wasn't a dream? The only thing funny about this whole film was the killer and the way he would look into the camera.

Stacie Ponder said...

I could barely make it through Slumber Party Massacre 2, but I'd watch it 10 more times before I'd watch this one again.

Yes, I neglected to mention the worst "twist" ending in history. It was all a dream! But then, it all starts really happening! I think. It just made no sense. Take the father, for instance:

He begins the movie at the hospital. He goes home, scolds the girls for being too loud, and leaves the house again. Ok...then he runs into some boys at the Quik-E-Mart, because he had to get orange juice for his wife on the way home from work. But then...he goes back to the hospital for the rest of the movie. Huh?

Or when the killer is following Girl A up the stairs...then when she walks into the bedroom, the killer jumps out of the closet! I guess he found a wormhole somewhere along the way.

Honestly, I'm a huge fan of bad movies. They still need to make sense, though, and this one is just about unwatchable. Virtually every shot is pointless and 30 seconds too long. The scalpel-in-the-camera thing was funny the first or second time, but the same shot over and over...whoo boy.

And I'd say at least a third of this movie was shot on Super 8.

Must...cleanse...brain...

John Barleycorn said...

See, no matter how much you rail against it, your review still makes me want to see it! It's that whole Gigli syndrome: everybody says it's bad, bad, bad, and to avoid it like the plague ... but curiosity ... oh, curiosity, it gets you, and suddenly you're seeking a copy on the Internet.

I'll try to resist Stacie, but I don't know. It may be impossible.

-pbd said...

hmm...i think the same spirit that effected your post has somehow tainted me as well!!!

anyway...great review.

fun blog too!

-pbd

Stacie Ponder said...

Brennon, I know that urge, I really do. If you're too weak to resist, as I may have been myself, then all I can say, my friend, is go with god.

Go with god.



GROO!

warrenzone said...

I have a tape of this movie, it is awful, I think some of it is shot on video and some of it shot on film - I can't beleive it came out on DVD!

Antaeus Feldspar said...

Stacie, I'm flabbergasted. Yes, the movie really is a steaming pile of guano but how could you not mention the brilliant scene where the brain surgeon takes a call sitting on the bed where his dead wife is lying and, when he finishes the call, kisses her lips through the sheet and leaves?

Anonymous said...

Oh god, can it be worse than Slumber Party Massacre? Is it truly that terrible? At least it seems like if you had a friend with you for this film and at least two gallons of vodka you could laugh at it, but SPM2 was just frightening in you wouldn't want to come upon any of the people involved with it in a dark alley. Please tell me if it is that bad so I can join you in creating an amateur revenge-murder movie against all those who inflicted this monstrosity on the senses of hapless people. It could be called "Just Desserts." If it really is worse than SPM2 it deserves no less.