Slumber Party Massacre II

Years ago, Valerie Bates and her little sister Courtney were the soul survivors of a drill-wielding psychopath. However, the experience put poor Valerie in a mental institution, leaving her tomboyish little sister and the girls' mother alone to cope. That was years ago, however and now young Courtney has grown up to be a teenage knockout, who just happens to look like Crystal Bernard of the TV show "Wings" fame. She is struggling to live a normal life, despite terrible dreams involving her institutionalized sister, blood, gore, smoke and a James Dean-from Hell looking Rock N Roller, who just happens to use as his weapon of choice, GET THIS, a fire engine red guitar drill! She tries to put her dreams out of her mind by accompanying her girlfriends on a weekend of fun and partying, but her dreams go right along with her, as poor Courtney begins to have insane hallucinations involving the black clad shock rocker from her dreams. As this is going on, her friends slowly begin to disappear one by one. Can it be true? Has the Driller Killer been reincarnated as kind of a demonic Elvis Presley? Or is Miss Courtney Bates ready for a one way trip to the Booby Hatch? While this movie may not be (Ok, IS NOT) the greatest movie ever made, it does qualify as a KILLER B Movie (Pardon The Pun). Besides, let's be honest folks, who wouldn't want to own the Driller Killer's Guitar Drill? The Guitar Drill ALONE makes the movie worth seeing, and the gore sequences and fire special effects DON'T hurt.

Heidy Kozak looks so hot in this one, Juliette Cummings takes her top off, Kim McArthur is annoying and Crystal Bernard takes a bath... The guys just go to the house to die, the girls are hot I tell you...The effects were graphic enough, the blood was good, the plot was silly, but who cares? these chicks are hot!!!

Slumber Party Massacre II is not the first Slumber Party Massacre - what on God's green Earth could be? - but it cuts its own distinctive style by being so adorably terrible that one can't help but admire it somehow. It has padding in its 75 minute run-time, and can do that since the girl friends around the main character have a band (the sister from the previous film, Courtney, of the main girl from the last movie, though damn if I could remember that even having just seen the first one two weeks ago, different actress by the way of course).

It's also a movie where if there even *is* a serial killer is in question since it could all be in the majorly PTSD'd, nightmare-riddled Courtney's mind. If the first movie was liberally borrowing (one might say ripping off but no, heavens no, that's not the Corman way is it?) from Halloween, then this is liberally borrowing from the Nightmare on Elm Street films (a scene of Courtney in a bath-tub seems like it was lifted so hard from the first one its ridiculous, and I almost thought it would oddly enough take from the third one, which came out the same year, but not quite the case), and at the heart of it is the most awesomely silly killer I've ever seen in a slasher.

Who is this killer? Try to imagine Quentin Tarantino hit his head on a sink and after he came to was tasked to write an 80's slasher movie - this is what he might come up with: Atanas Ilitch is having the time of his life playing this "Driller Killer", who would appear to be a psychological terror of Courtney's years after the first massacre happened, but is um... actually there? Is that a spoiler? The reasoning for why he finally leaps forward may actually make some sense is going by the usual (strict?) code of conduct for these kinds of movies - if you're a virgin, the moment you have sex is when you get it right through the vitals - and but in the moment it seems like it has only the slimmest rationale, and it fully becomes a "slasher", as in Ilitch's killer going after these innocent/obnoxious teens (some more than others), in the last act.

Before this is a lot of gloriously dumb scenes; at one point, the girls have an actual pillow fight and some/most of them take off their clothes to do so, and on that immediate beat two of the guys in the movie look on through a window and say, "they actually DO do this!" Again, the songs take up a good number of minutes (without them this might barely make a feature-length run-time), but they're not the worst ever, just that kind of mediocre 80's rock-pop that Corman was able to buy for 10 cents. The performances are also what you expect, but what makes the movie stand out a bit is that the filmmaker - once again a woman, and Corman was good about hiring women to make his movies, regardless of artistry, Deborah Brock in this case - tries to ape at times another Corman alumni, Jonathan Demme; there are multiple scenes where characters look directly at the camera as if to us and speak (for example when one of the teens finally calls the cops, prematurely really, when Courtney is having one of her hallucination/nightmare freak-outs). What is this supposed to do? I am sure I still don't know.

A lot of this is not good, and actually it's pretty terrible. What gives it the rating it gets is that it's a massively entertaining bad movie, one of those that sticks out among the multitudes of 80's slashers (and back then you could randomly throw a rock and hit a piece of s*** slasher movie); what is significant here is that the pace never slackens too much, the actors are mostly likable, the tone is appropriately silly (but not in a way where they're too knowing of it), and the climax is completely bananas as characters run through an unfinished building as the slasher/singer does his Rockabilly thing with his drill. It'd also be a total blast for a party movie night.

Has there ever been a movie that would have been hurt by having a plot? I point to Slumber Party Massacre II. Who was the killer? Where did he come from? Why was he killing them? Where can I get a guitar like that? Why did he continually do the intro to "wipe-out?" Was it all a dream? Or was it a memory of a dream of a hallucination of a dream? Does the director want me to believe that break-dancing is frightening? Why didn't the girl with large breasts get naked? Why did the ugly girl get naked at all? Why the blow-up doll? Why did they build up the romance of the girl from Wings (the sitcom, not the parade of stock footage from the Discovery channel which was much more entertaining) and Rob Lowe's little brother , only for him to be the first to get drilled? Was the killer made out of oily rags? What was happening at all in this movie!

Frankly, I don't care. A lucid plot would have been a dead weight on this movie, dragging it down and holding it back from becoming the paragon of movie making that it is. All movies should be written and directed while drunk and filmed over a weekend in a housing development while the foreman was in the port-a-jon. A rocker with a drill on his guitar! Breakdancing! Blow-up dolls! Unlike the killer, I got satisfaction!

One of the survivors from the original Courtney (Crystal Bernard) is having horrible dreams while her sister Valerie is in a mental institution. Courtney also plays guitar in a band with other schoolmates Amy (Kimberly McArthur) and interestingly two FRIDAY THE 13TH victims in Juliette Cummins (playing Sheila) and Heidi Kozak (playing Sally). Sadly, they are rather unconvincing as a band. Anyways, the band is going to Sheila's dads' new condo for the weekend. Meanwhile, Courtney is dreaming of a rocker (Atanas Ilitch) donning leather who just happens to have a large drill on the end of his guitar. And who also has zippo to do with the original driller killer.

Borrows poorly from the vastly superior A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and any connection made to the original is really paper-thin. This movie really is a mess and would have given it a higher vote, but the last 20 minutes were just down right horrible. In fact while chasing his victims the serial killer doesn't break into song once...no he does it twice. B-B-B-B-BAD!

Might work to watch with some horror buddies over a few beers to get a good laugh at, but not in the same ball park as the original.