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Overview
We travel back in time to a true pioneer in the horror movie field. No, not because it’s a slasher. No, not because you get the naked (almost) pillow fight. No, it’s not because women are losing their shirts before getting killed. No, it’s not because you have a college group of kids getting stalked and killed.
All of those are great guesses because this movies is the genesis of some lingering tropes.
The pioneer is that we get a slasher movie will all of those and it’s directed by a woman. And she not only took some heat for it at the time, but turned down what many would have said was a better choice.
But what we get is an early example of a ‘typical’ slasher movie – even though it breaks some rules and is a not only spiritual successor to Black Christmas, but also adds it’s own to the genre.
Buy yeah, there’s still some boobs.
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Transcript
Stephen: Alright new Season six movie. We’re just coming along. I’m trying to get a couple of these out here before Halloween, which is when we’re recording it, but this will probably come out like right before Christmas.
Rhys: That sounds about right
Stephen: but so we got an oldie but a goodie, a classic Slumber Party massacre.
Rhys: indeed. 1982. A film that definitely looks like a slasher exploitation film, the late seventies, early eighties, written by a woman. Directed by a woman.
Stephen: right and just, by the title of it and the poster I would’ve thought it was a deep discussion, a deep, exploration of the human condition and yeah, no it is what it looks like
Rhys: It is
Stephen: and I joke about that, but there’s good reasons to look at this movie too, which we’ll talk about, I’m sure as we go on.
Rhys: absolutely, it was made in 1982. It was written by an author named Rita May Brown. It was directed by Amy Holden Jones. And if there’s gonna be a villain in this story, his [00:01:00] name’s going to be Roger Corman, very famous producer. He was the executive producer of this film. He had very specific thoughts about what would make a movie successful and what wouldn’t.
Stephen: Whatever those are, and we could disagree with them totally. But his name is known and he did a lot in horror and there’s a lot of horror out there because of him at the very least.
Rhys: absolutely, and I won’t say that he was wrong at the time because
Stephen: change too over time.
Rhys: Yep. Roger Corman’s whole thing was blood boobs, and, but.
Stephen: So we have no tropes going on in this movie at all. That, like one of the things like, so take every trope for a slasher movie, horror movie, every joke that people make about horror movies this is the reason they exist. This movie right here, that’s almost exactly what I put in my notes.
Rhys: And it’s funny because that’s how it was originally [00:02:00] billed. So re, Rita Mae Brown wrote the first draft of this script and she wrote it as a tongue in cheek satirical feminist take on modern slasher films.
Stephen: Okay. And we gotta keep in mind, black Christmas was 10 years before this.
Rhys: right. And there’s a little debate here, like her original script was called Sleepless Nights, but then some places say it was called Don’t Open the Door. It’s hard to say which it was called, but after that, she didn’t touch the script. She took, wrote the script, turned it into Harvey Corman or Harvey Roger Corman. And he just put it on the scrap pile. It was just sitting there, not gonna do anything with it. She, however, was a very successful art writer. She was born in 44 in Hanover, Pennsylvania. She only wrote 10 screenplays, but she did 10 standalone novels. And then she has three series. She has the Running Mead series, the Mrs.
[00:03:00] Murphy, my mystery series, the Mags Rogers Mysteries. Oh, and the sister Mary, sister Jane Mysteries, mags Rogers. There’s only two titles, but
Stephen: She’ll. So she’s an early cozy mystery writer.
Rhys: Yes.
Stephen: yeah. And I love that. She writes horror and cozies,
Rhys: yeah. And she also writes a lot of biographical stuff. She’s a very outspoken lesbian woman who grew up in, where was it? Hanover, Pennsylvania, which, is gonna definitely give you plenty of things to pull from, to write stories from and, I think it was her running Mead series.
It’s basically all about the people who live in a town on the Maryland border, and it’s not, they’re not mysteries. I don’t really think it’s more of a genre, a day in the life of but, so
Stephen: I love that because you get some of the best creative people that do more than just one genre, one thing, like Prince, you know how many different styles of music he wrote plus [00:04:00] screenplays and stuff, and here she is, cozy Mysteries and horror. In today’s author advice, it’s usually pick one very thin thing and that’s all you should focus on.
God, that’s so hard for those of us with a DH, D and shit,
Rhys: for sure. So she wrote the script and turned it in and it was supposed to be this kind of satire, Amy. Then along comes Amy Holden Jones. She was born in 53 in Florida, moved in an early age to New York. She did a short film in the seventies for a show, like some local show submitted it.
Martin Scorsese was the judge at the show. Yeah, she
Stephen: what year was this about?
Rhys: about 1970.
Stephen: Okay, so he was known, but not huge.
Rhys: Yes. And the only reason I know that is ’cause what happens next. She was going through a rough patch and so she’s you know what? I really enjoyed making that movie. So she [00:05:00] writes to Martin Scorsese and says, Hey, I don’t know if you remember I did this short movie. You judged it, you seemed to like it.
And he hired her as his personal assistant for taxi driver.
Stephen: Oh my gosh. Wow. What a movie to get in on.
Rhys: So she was his assistant and taxi driver. She met the cinematographer Michael Chapman. They fell in love. They got married. They stayed married, clear up until he died in the nineties.
Stephen: Wow. Through mysterious circumstance. No, sorry.
Rhys: Scorsese told her, you’re just way too good to just be an assistant. And so she started doing film editing
Stephen: Which. I’ll point out again, we’re doing this whole season on women and there’s not quite as many, but somebody with Scorsese’s big bigness and as popular as he is and so how good to, for him to not care, whether it’s man, woman, black, white, red, whatever. You’re just good end of story.
That, that’s really what it should be. Why are we in 2025? And it’s still an argument, we’ve [00:06:00] got these horror movies from women and people are like, women do horror movies, so just a little social commentary from horror lasagna there. We love good stuff regardless who does it?
Rhys: So he hooked her up with Roger Corman, and she worked as an editor for both of them throughout the seventies. And then she realized that, if you’re doing editing, you’re, it’s not really your film. So she wanted to direct and she asked Corman if he would. if she directed. And he’s you’ve done some, she’d done some documentaries and stuff.
He’s there’s nothing here that like hits. Scratches my itch. She went through his office and found this discarded script for don’t open the door or Sleepless Nights, depending on who you ask. And she took the first eight pages and decided she was gonna just do a short of that. She cost two grand.
She made it, she showed it to him and he’s you did this for two grand. And she’s [00:07:00] yeah. He is here’s $200,000. Make a feature film outta it.
Stephen: Wow
Rhys: it was one of those kind of things where he was like, he wasn’t interested again, blood, boobs, butts, that was it. So she went and met him. Where he was at and he green lit her project. And she went on to do that. The funny thing is she actually turned down doing an editing gig for a guy named Spielberg working on a little film that was called ET the Extraterrestrial.
She was gonna be the chief editor for that, but she turned it down to make this movie instead.
Stephen: That’ll ever last.
Rhys: She.
Stephen: Spielberg did early TV shows like dual that, really set him up for being who he is today. So I’m surprised she didn’t like, maybe go maybe I’ll hook onto him that would’ve, Scorsese, Spielberg, who else is she going to hang out with?
Rhys: And the thing was [00:08:00] like she had the job if she wanted it, but she was at that place in her life where she wanted to direct. She had been editing, so it wasn’t even is this gonna be a big successful thing? It was, yeah, I know this is an opportunity, but I really wanna go in this direction.
And so that’s where she went.
Stephen: Good for her.
Rhys: She only directed four pieces. She directed this one something called Love Letters, something called Made to Order, and something called the Rich Man’s Wife.
Stephen: Okay.
Rhys: She also produced four, including this one and three other television series called HMS, white Coat, black Box, and a show called The Resident, which ran 107 episodes.
Stephen: Yeah, that one sounds familiar actually.
Others sound familiar, but some titles, just sound like everything else.
Rhys: yeah, she has an upcoming show that she produced called Archie.
Stephen: oh, so she’s still around, still doing it.
Rhys: She is still around. That’s, yeah, I, I’ve failed to mention that she is still around. Rita May Brown died I think in the ear [00:09:00] mid two thousands. But Amy Holden Jones went on to write 22 pieces.
Stephen: wow.
Rhys: Now she redid the script for this movie, so she has writing credit on that. But she also wrote mystic Pizza, which, was a big film back in the eighties.
She did all of the Beethoven dog movies.
Stephen: Okay. I could see that becoming a slasher movie easily.
Rhys: Yeah. Indecent proposal. She wrote that. As well as the series that she produced, black Box and the resident, she wrote those too.
Stephen: Nice.
Rhys: she has gone on to be very successful. Not necessarily as a director, in lots of other very worthwhile endeavors.
Stephen: Yeah, it sounds very Michael CRE ish.
Rhys: Yeah. Okay. I can see that. So the [00:10:00] cast what we’re gonna run into with a lot of these people, and I wanna give a shout out to cinema Wasteland. I was looking for interviews and somebody had recorded Cinema Wasteland had brought in Michael Ella, Debra Deliso and Brink Stevens for a panel discussion. And it was so funny, Debra Deliso was like, I am just floored by the fact that so many people turned out to actually talk to us about this movie.
Stephen: That’s awesome.
Rhys: But then I looked up Cinema Wasteland was, is in Berea.
Stephen: Sweet.
Rhys: It was just like, oh. Hey, well done guys. Your interviews turned out to be a great resource for us.
Stephen: Yeah. Nice. And if we’re gonna do, shouts out let’s do one to your brother-in-law, Mike again. I think we did one years ago, but he still listens to us and now I think we’re pulling into children,
Rhys: it’s true. Hi. So a lot of the people who are on here are, like, we had done what [00:11:00] was it? We had done one where we talked about b rated horror movies in Canada and like the community they build, this is very similar where we’re going to be talking about, we’re gonna be mentioning movies that no one’s ever seen. So
Stephen: I think that was Phantom of the Paradise, wasn’t it?
Rhys: no, it wasn’t, it was the one about the girl and her mom. And the girl turns out to be the sociopathic killer.
Stephen: Oh okay. Just a while back.
Rhys: David Wallace’s film from season five. Michael Mic, Michelle Michaels played Trish, she’s the main character. She was born in Vegas. She’s only done my nine pieces. And they include such titles as New Year’s Evil.
Stephen: One.
Rhys: okay. Demon Rage,
Stephen: No, I haven’t seen that one.
Rhys: death Wish four.
Stephen: Oh, wow.
Rhys: And she has an upcoming piece called Small Town Stories,
Stephen: Interesting.
Rhys: but there’s not a [00:12:00] whole lot out there on Michelle Michaels.
She did a fine job as the lead in this movie. And I don’t know, was she good in New Year’s Eve?
Stephen: I’ll have to go back and look ’cause I don’t remember the whole thing. It’s an okay movie. For horror. It’s just that it’s a holiday movie.
Rhys: Robin still played Valerie. She was from Philadelphia. She was born in 61. She did 10 more pieces with titles like the Life and Loves of a Male Stripper.
Stephen: The one born in Vegas didn’t do that one.
Rhys: It’s true. Sorority babes in the slime ball, Borama American Ninja for the Annihilation. So
Stephen: Fun.
Rhys: yes unfortunately she ended up committing suicide in 1996,
Stephen: Oh, that
Rhys: so she’s no longer with us. Neither is Michael Valla, who played Russ Thorn. He was the killer. [00:13:00] He was born in 1940 in Dearborn, Michigan. He died last year. He acted in nine pieces, including an episode of amazing Stories. Speaking of Spielberg and Blue Orchid. And Blue Orchid two. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those. I saw the first one, but.
Stephen: No,
Rhys: He was a method actor. He had studied under Strasberg and Adler. And as such, like when he was on set, he wouldn’t talk to any of the other cast.
Stephen: another one of those, huh?
Rhys: He would actually sit far away from them or stand at corners of doors and like just stare at them. And, from around the corner he developed the entire backstory for his character.
But then after he like killed you Debra Deliso was saying after he killed me, he like, just came up and apologized for being so creepy and everything and, it was just fine. But even like he was at that panel and just hearing him [00:14:00] talk, like he so easily stepped back into that role.
Stephen: wow.
Rhys: But yeah.
Interesting guy.
Stephen: Didn’t we have another movie where the bad guy did that and like when he went to the cast party, people didn’t know who he was, mama or something like that.
Rhys: Yeah, it wasn’t Mama because that was,
Stephen: That was David Jones.
Rhys: Deborah Deliso, we mentioned her a couple times. She plays Kim. She was born in Alameda, California in 56. She was also sitting on that panel. She was a trained actress in a dancer. She was in 24 pieces as an actress, and she even directed and produced a few projects. She worked consistently over time.
Just, not a really heavy pace, 24, she still has two upcoming con projects. Something called the Exquisite Continent and Small Town Stories.
She, she wasn’t overly comfortable with the nudity, and so she was complaining to one of her friends about having to [00:15:00] shoot the shower scene and her friend’s I’ll come with you and do it with you.
And so she brought her friend along and, asked the producers and they’re like, sure. And so she just, but she was also a teacher and she said she would frequently run into, she was a high school teacher, she would run into male students who would be like, Hey, I’ve seen your movie.
And they’d be staring right at her breasts when they would say it.
Stephen: of course,
Rhys: And she was like, you’d expect that from the kids, but the male staff members were the same. And the, in the faculty.
Stephen: I seventies, eighties, and I don’t think it’s changed a whole lot.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just a little less acceptable now, I think, than it was
Stephen: Now everybody would know about the movie right away from YouTube and clips and everything.
Rhys: Oh, for sure.
Stephen: be worse.
Rhys: Gina Snicker, hunter played Diane. She’s been at 11 pieces. Much of that was like television. Like she was on Kojak trapper, John md. She had a [00:16:00] long run on a show called Oregon, the Oregon Trail.
Stephen: Did she die a dysentery in that one?
Rhys: The big film she was in that I remember as a kid very vividly was the sword and the Sorcerer. So she was in that she would not do nudity, which if you think back on the movie, you’re like, there’s a scene with her in a car and her boyfriend how did they accomplish that without her doing nudity?
Amy Holden Joy was just like, Hey, I’ll give anybody extra money if they’re willing to sit in for Gina in this scene. And Michelle Michael, who played Trish, it was like, I’ll take it. And so when her boyfriend, you have a closeup of the boyfriend fondling her breast, that’s actually Trish’s breast, not Diane’s.
Stephen: Interesting. Body doubles.
Rhys: which is why you don’t get to see her face while it’s happening, I’m sure.
Stephen: Weird angle.
Rhys: Joseph Allen Johnson, he was also on the panel. He played Neil. He was born [00:17:00] in 57 in Charleston, West Virginia. He died in 2020. He only acted in eight more pieces, including a film that he wrote called Ice, which was in the late eighties when it came out. But he spent some time in Italy doing English voiceover for Italian films and things like that.
And actually ended up doing a film with Lucio fci,
Stephen: Oh
Rhys: called I Soma, which they asked him about Italian actors. He’s they’re lazy. They don’t go to school, they don’t do any education. They just sit around. They smoke and they drink and they bitch about having be called to set and then they do their scene and then they just go back to doing whatever they wanted.
So wow. Okay. The last person we’re gonna talk about as far as the cast goes is Brink Stevens. She played Linda. Which is the first student kill in the movie. She’s the one who has to go back for her [00:18:00] book.
Stephen: Okay.
Rhys: was supposed to have a much bigger role, but she had a modeling shoot already set up at Lake Tahoe, so she couldn’t stay the whole week.
So she had to just do her shot and then go.
Stephen: Okay.
Rhys: But she is a true scream queen. She was born in San Diego and she works, she has been in 233 pieces.
Stephen: Wow.
Rhys: She’s got 25 upcoming projects as well.
Stephen: Wow.
Rhys: Like her first full length, major motion
Stephen: doing the nudity.
Rhys: She was ranked like number 18 of the top 50 sexy butts of Hollywood movie stars.
Stephen: Oh, nice. That’s what’s that award look like?
Rhys: I her first film was in 1972 called necromancy. Uhhuh. She was also in, this is Spinal Tap body Double
Stephen: Okay.
Rhys: The Three Amigos.[00:19:00]
Stephen: Oh wow. That’s an interesting difference.
Rhys: Yeah. Sorority Babes and Slime Ball Borama, which we’ve mentioned already. She was in some Tales of the Dark Side. And the 2024 remake of House on Haunted Hill,
Stephen: Oh
Rhys: I were just talking about.
Stephen: yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: The upcoming project she has, ’cause she has so many, I’m just gonna list the ones in post-production. How to Kill Your Coworkers and Get away with It. Kevin kills Merry Day and The Scream Queens Super special. The house that Zombies built, the Krampus Carol. The Witches of the Sands, a blood moon rising Dorothea. And one piece that was just listed as completed called View from the Edge.
Stephen: So essentially what you’re really saying there is don’t look for her on the hallmark Channel at Christmas time.
Rhys: correct she really embraced the whole Scream Queen thing. [00:20:00] She had no issue with nudity from her perspective. That was just part of the gig. If you were making movies back then, you expected to be naked in them. And if you’re thinking, oh, some scream queen, yada, she has a degree in biology and psychology from San Diego State.
She has a master’s degree in marine biology from the Scripps Institute. She was married to Dave Stevens who did the Rocketeer comic.
Stephen: Okay.
Rhys: They were only married for six months, but they remained close friends, even afterwards. And she posed for the pinup model that showed up in the comic book as well. She just has so much stuff that she has been involved with. It’s just, it’s crazy. You could just go on and on. With all the things that she’s been involved with it’s pretty amazing.
Stephen: Nice
Rhys: Yeah. So she did that first. [00:21:00] She played Linda, the first person to die, which we’ll get to here in a minute. After she recorded it, they spent 45 minutes in the parking lot with the sound guy doing screams over and over again to get just the right scream for them to use for sound.
And she said it was actually good because it really got her to like dial in. The scream, which is like what she does.
Stephen: Wow. That’s and I like that you say that, and people don’t realize sometimes how much they spend on that type of thing, that they don’t just film the person screaming that they sometimes overdub it with, in a studio with maybe certain things there to give the right reflection or the right absorption or, then they adjust it, like a soundboard for a rock album or something.
They do that a lot. And actually when we get to doing some of the indie local films, that is one, one of the things I noticed, big difference is sound and lighting. You can usually tell [00:22:00] a small indie film, but because of the sound and lighting it gives it away. So it’s interesting that here we have an example of a pretty big movie and how they spent that much time just to get one screen right.
Rhys: Yeah. It’s voice, voice after recording is what they do and it’s such a big deal. My wife and I have been watching the X-Files and we got to an episode last night where apparently something was off with the sound when they recorded the episode. ’cause everything was voice after. Was VAR clear up until the last third of the movie?
Last third of the episode. And it’s jarring because, no matter how much you try, you’re never gonna be right on it. But that’s how important getting good sound was to Chris Carter when he made those films. Or made those shows.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: So this film was made on a limited budget, 200,000. They filmed it in three weeks [00:23:00] and some of the things she did to. Trim the fat. Her brother Ralph Jones, she used as the composer. He wrote all of the music, recorded all of it, and it was all done on a small Cassio keyboard.
Stephen: We’ve seen those,
Rhys: We have the entire film was based basically on three locations. You have a school and two houses. They were all right next to each other.
Stephen: Nice.
Rhys: So even in the movie, it looks like, there’s this long walk home from the school.
It’s not, it was just them filming in the street. ’cause the house was right next to it.
Stephen: There. There you go folks. Something to keep in mind as you watch YouTube and TikTok videos, you’re only seeing what’s right in front of the camera. You don’t know what’s around and it can fool you. So there you go.
Rhys: Yeah. And if, we’ve mentioned it before, if you, one of these people likes to hunt these places down, this was all in Mar Vista, California.
Stephen: We should get a map on the website and pinpoint different filming locations,
Rhys: there you go.
Stephen: what movie it is. That’d take a little work. It might be fun,
Rhys: She [00:24:00] used her husband Michael Chapman for cinematography on this, who’s probably the highest echelon person on staff being the guy who did the cinematography for taxi driver for God’s
Stephen: right?
Rhys: Corman was so cheap he wouldn’t pay for a generator and you’re shooting a slasher at night in the suburbs. So the the set electricians would climb the light poles and tie directly into the power lines. Apparently when they were shooting some of the stuff, they would draw so much light that the street lamps in Mar Vista with dim. So it, those are some pretty dedicated set people who are willing to do that for you.
Stephen: Yeah, that just sounds like accidents waiting to happen.
Rhys: Yeah. Before we actually get into the whole thing, I just, this is one of the reasons I picked this. There’s two, you had Roger [00:25:00] Corman, and I don’t know that Amy Holden Jones cared, but the actresses did. He would constantly come in and try and get more nudity added to the film. He kept pushing for more and more to happen, and so what some of them did, they actually went into the shower scene and put black gaffer tape over their nipples. So when they filmed it, they couldn’t use frontal nudity of them in those scenes, which is why if you’re watching the shower scene, there’s a whole lot of girls with their backs turned.
Stephen: Right.
Rhys: ’cause they didn’t want to be nude in the scene.
Corman was insisting and Amy Holden Jones was like, it was what it was. He had a checklist of what he wanted to see and we just went through it and we marked them off. She didn’t wanna force anyone to do anything they weren’t comfortable with, but that’s what they needed for the money.
Stephen: Yeah things have changed [00:26:00] just a little, I wouldn’t say tons, but you don’t get as much of that nudity in that they try and be more stylistic and stuff about it. But, this time period, how many movies can you name where it’s a college dorm room movie watching movie,
Rhys: yeah. The other thing I wanted to point out in this Amy Holden Jones caught a lot of crap as a sellout because she filmed this film with all the nudity and all the stereotypical masculine misogynistic stuff. And she was a woman. And she’s and this is a quote, that’s what Roger Corman, the producer wanted, and that’s how it’s done.
You give the studio what they want. Nobody complains that Scorsese, Jonathan Demi and Ron Howard made exploitation films, but when a woman tries, she gets called a hypocrite and a turn code. And that’s bullshit.
Stephen: Good for her. I agree with that.
Rhys: [00:27:00] 110%, yeah. If she had refused to do it, the movie would’ve never been made and we would’ve never had this conversation.
Stephen: Exactly. Yeah. Or somebody else would’ve made it anyway and then she probably wouldn’t have had any career.
Rhys: She would’ve been an editor. She’d have been the editor on et
Stephen: which may, that’s a choose your own adventure right there.
Rhys: It is. All right, we’ll start talking about the film. It’s not super complex plot wise,
Stephen: yeah, I was gonna make some snide comment about her redoing the writing. I’m like, yeah, what did that take an afternoon tea? You know what I mean? Come on. The plot is what you would expect from a seventies, early eighties slasher film. But I will make the comment that I’m not big on slasher films. I’ve seen quite a few of them.
There’s some good ones I think, that have come out in recent years. I think they’ve gotten better. And we mentioned Black Christmas, which was an early slasher film, and it was in this style had Lois Lane in it. So that [00:28:00] makes it fun. But. For being 10 years later, you would think maybe things have evolved, but it really didn’t.
This is even more I don’t wanna give it a bad tone, but there’s not as much plot. There’s as like Friday the 13th, I mean I make fun of Friday the 13th in Halloween. But the plot in Friday the 13th, is definitely more con convincing, intricate better, whatever than this one. This is in fact this one.
There’s even no motivation for the killer. He gets outta jail ’cause he is psycho and he goes and kills people. End of story. Friday the 13th had a little bit more than that. Halloween really didn’t until they reccon things later. That’s a whole nother discussion there.
Rhys: Yeah, I think so. Friday the 13th from a plot standpoint, it tides everything up with a bow.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: it starts out here you think the killer’s this, the killer’s not, here’s the twist. The killer’s actually this, and here’s why. And when you’re done [00:29:00] with it it’s done. It’s complete. I think
Stephen: then they added the scene where she gets yanked out of the boat by the dead boy, blah, blah, blah. So they could have a sequel, but Cut. Ignore that part.
Rhys: But even at that, it, it still finishes the story up and leads into the next one.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: And they did make a second one of these, by the way, there is a slumber party massacre too, and there’s one called, I think called the cheerleader massacre, which is very similar to this. And in fact. Shoot, in fact, brink Stevens shows up there at play replaying her own her old character, which is weird ’cause you’re like, Linda’s the first kill. You don’t actually see Linda die. She’s killed off camera. And so she shows up with a giant scar on her face. And in that is, but
Stephen: that’s funny.
Rhys: what Halloween does that is different than Friday the 13th, is that [00:30:00] they don’t answer the questions.
So much so that you never actually see who’s behind the mask. You do have Loomis there talking a little bit about the character, but the drive in things and how he got where he was is very loose. And it doesn’t actually get solidified until way later in the series leaving it a cliffhanger.
One of the things, the guy on the panel at cinema Wasteland pointed out with this movie is thorn the killer. Russ Thorn, nothing fancy about him, which is super creepy.
Stephen: He doesn’t have a mask,
Rhys: doesn’t wear a mask, he doesn’t hide his face. He literally could just be the guy in the grocery store pushing aisle, pushing a cart quietly, pulling stuff off the shelves.
Stephen: in giving people creepy vibes. Just looking at him.
Rhys: Exactly. And how many times have you seen someone like that? You’re going through Walmart and there is this guy who’s just like a little bit off who’s going [00:31:00] around buying stuff. This is like a worst case scenario of that and. On top of that, they leave him silent through the entire movie until the end where he just starts to talk.
And what he’s saying is Disquieting in and of itself. So I don’t know that, yeah, there’s not much in the way of story here to sit there and dissect, some of the choices they made were great for character.
Stephen: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I do like watching it and looking at, the other slashers through the last couple decades up to now. Like I said, I think some of them now have definitely evolved the whole slasher genre of what they do. They still try the, some psycho for some reason is killing people.
That’s the basics of all of them. But they’re doing things more now, reasons why, or some [00:32:00] plot behind it and whatever. For good or bad, maybe you just want to go and see that. Colin said, he’s oh, watch my bloody Valentine. It’s got the best kill guy gets his face skulled in hotdog water.
It’s the best kill. And that’s what people watch these for. They want the kills. It’s like going to racing so you can see the crashes.
Rhys: And so many times nowadays it’s all done tongue in cheek, right? Like hard eyes and stuff like that where you have the standard slasher and they’re like, we know this is a trope. It’s funny. Just sit back and enjoy it. Which is definitely one take you, one direction you could take, but you could also look at.
Like barbarian and you could call that a slasher film because you have one relentless hunting killer who is tracking down everybody who happens to be around that house. And it was not funny. It was a very serious take on the situation. So it has evolved quite a bit,
Stephen: Yeah. And I do that they even at the time, thought of it more as a slight [00:33:00] parody of the, the other one that reminds me of the time was student bodies, which I always remember from when we were kids watching it with what Melvin, the janitor with his breathing the whole time. And that’s, it’s a comedy horror is what they say.
It.
Rhys: Yeah. They rewrote the script and tried to make it more serious, but there’s definitely little humorous aspects throughout it, for sure.
Stephen: And if you’re like, we joked when I, we were watching these things if you’re 12 years old Yep. This is the horror movie to rent without your parents knowing it,
Rhys: For sure. Yeah. 12-year-old boys, lots of boobs and butts and blood.
Stephen: there’s our recommendation right there for you. You don’t need anything else.
Rhys: You are Roger Corman’s, target demographic,
Stephen: exactly.
Rhys: boys. The movie starts like your typical slasher film. You have this house in California and you have a boy delivering newspapers. [00:34:00] It’s, and I thought a lot of times we’ll talk about things shot in California or we just did the raw when we did France where you get some really nice environmental shots.
Because they’re in beautiful places. I thought like the environmental and establishing shots here were really well done. I mean it looked like California. You looked at it and you could say, you know what a gorgeous morning in California. And I think that kind of hearkens back to, oh, this happens to be the cinematographer who did taxi driver as well.
He knows what he’s doing.
Stephen: These type of openings though always remind me of that one Stephen King short story of the milkman where you, if you remember that I think from night shift or creep. Whatever. But where it’s idyllic and it’s just several pages of the idyllic small town in this milk man delivering milk, and then he like puts poison in it and leaves it [00:35:00] on the doorstep, so these always remind me of that.
Rhys: And it’s funny ’cause it always reminds me of the start of Halloween.
Time I see these where you’re in a California suburb, we said the same thing about get out. It starts, you’re in a California suburb, it’s that same kind of thing.
Stephen: Except I think Haddenfield was Illinois though, right?
Rhys: Yeah, it was supposed to be, it was actually shot in Alabama. But, regardless there on the newspaper, and this is, we talked about this with Mama, how you get your story bits across without doing a giant info dump on the front cover of the newspaper is a thing about Russ Thorn murder of Five Escapes prison.
And then the camera moves on, but it definitely lingers there long enough for you to have seen that.
Stephen: And if you don’t know what type of movie you’re watching, you may miss that, but please.
Rhys: The funny thing too is that when they take that shot with the newspaper, that’s when Michael Villa’s name shows up, the guy who plays the [00:36:00] killer, which I thought was cool. And then we had this woman waking up. There’s a, an alarm. It’s a jump scare ’cause the music’s been building tension and then all of a sudden there’s this scream and it’s somebody want a t-shirt on a radio show.
And that’s, and this is Trish. She’s waking up to the radio alarm clock. She opens the closet with a mirror and then closes it. They do all of this stuff to like, is there somebody in there? But there’s nothing there. Nothing bad is happening.
Stephen: Nothing yet.
Rhys: And we do get our first gratuitous boob shot as Trish changes her clothes and you get the feeling
Stephen: that. It’s good to know. Boobs haven’t changed that much in several decades.
Rhys: true. It’s, it, you can tell she’s gonna be the final girl, especially if are familiar with the whole trope because everything in her room looks innocent. It looks like she’s like a 12-year-old girl. Everything’s in pink and white and lace and all this stuff, but she is [00:37:00] not, she’s a grown woman and she’s backing up toys to throw them out. And then the radio announcer,
Stephen: overnight.
Rhys: right? The radio announcer is like Killer Russ Thor, murderer of five escapes prison. So again, we went from the newspaper to the radio. It gets mentioned again. Her parents are taking off on vacation. She still is, loves and is nice to her parents. Her kind of creepy neighbor is there.
What was his name? Mr. Common or something like that. Really odd name. She’s polite to him. And then she throws all those toys out in the bag, in the trash and walks off to school.
Stephen: she should have saved them. They’d be worth a lot more now.
Rhys: It’s true. And someone tries to because a hand reaches in off screen and grabs the Barbie doll and takes it out of the trash. But we’re at school. You have a maintenance woman up there [00:38:00] running a drill with some wires. You’re introduced to Neil and Jeff. They’re your typical slasher eighties boys only concerned with sex and getting laid.
Stephen: Good movie to be in.
Rhys: Yes. And Jeff is gonna flirt with this woman who is doing the repair. He is trying Super lame. Pick up lines. She’s polite to him. She doesn’t tell him to piss off or anything, but then they like decide they’re gonna be late to class. So they walk off and as they’re walking off this woman’s outside of her van.
The van door opens a set of arms, grabs her, pulls it in, and closes the door. The boys are sitting there talking as they’re walking away and you can see her pounding on the back window of the van and the hands pull her down. And like you can see inside the van, there is a man. We don’t see his face yet.
He’s [00:39:00] fumbling around. He finds a drill and drills her to death.
Stephen: Yeah, he does. He does use what’s around him, I must say.
Rhys: He does cut to girls playing basketball. None of the women in this film knew how to play basketball.
Stephen: I would not have guessed that from watching this scene whatsoever. I was gonna make a comment on that. I’m like, this is as bad as in raw when they’re playing video games poorly.
Rhys: And they were talking about that on the panel. They’re like, we had no idea we had to learn how to play basketball in an afternoon. And in my notes I’m like, it looks like gym class.
Stephen: Yeah, that’s what I thought it was.
Rhys: if they would’ve said, oh, gym class, let’s hit the showers. Now we’re done. But no, they called them the varsity basketball team.
And I’m like, you guys have won nothing. I guarantee your ball handling skills not good.
Stephen: I’m not even a basketball player. And I was like, wow, that’s [00:40:00] does not look good.
Rhys: Yes. The, one of the big takeaways from this scene is we’re introduced to Valerie. She’s a new girl. She’s good at basketball. Everybody else hates her. ’cause she’s good at basketball.
Stephen: What’s wrong? Just wanna help you.
Rhys: not necessarily everybody, but Diane really doesn’t like her.
Stephen: Yeah. Y yeah. You got this typical girl trope characters in this also, the stuck up rich bitch and, the innocent sweet one and everything. Yeah. It’s kinda like watching an anime.
Rhys: So they go to hit the showers. We’ve already talked about how they weren’t all excited about it. And I get it because the camera work in the shower scene is just Hey, naked woman, slow pan, face down, another naked woman, slow pan, face down. It’s okay, I get it.
Stephen: It’s what they want in the movie, so what else do you need?
Rhys: I guess. And back then you didn’t have, online porn ready
Stephen: Exactly.
Rhys: need [00:41:00] so. Trish is trying to be nice to Valerie after the shower. She invites, she wants to invite her to the party. And Diane’s no, she shouldn’t come, and she’s a bitch and blah, blah, blah. Valerie can hear them talk and so she’s leaving and Trish runs over to invite her and she’s no, I don’t think so. So you have the girls who are gonna have the party. It’s Diane, Trish, Kim, I can’t remember all their names, but they’re leaving with Jeff and Neil. As they’re walking away, there’s this guy sitting in a telephone repair van, which we know what happened to the owner of that. So this guy must be the killer. And again, they don’t make any effort to hide who he is. He is just here he is.
Stephen: It’s a unique thing in this type of movie.
Rhys: Yeah. He’s just sitting there quietly. And Linda forgot that her book in her locker, so she has to go back in to get it.
Stephen: We know what’s gonna happen now, don’t
Rhys: [00:42:00] Yes. She goes in, she runs by this stage. She runs into her coach and her coach is hurry up. ’cause it’ll be locking the building up. Which is really weird because like when they lock the building up, they lock the building up.
You can’t get in or out.
Stephen: Dude, I got locked in the high school once I, I went in to get a book on a Saturday and of course, the cheerleaders were there practicing. By the time I got my book and got back to the door, they had all left. The janitor locked it up with the chain and everything, and every classroom door was locked.
I was stuck in the hallway. I was about ready to pull the fire alarm.
Rhys: Use your cell phone, Steve,
Stephen: Yeah, I used my cell phone in 1986 or
Rhys: Yeah. Tr grabs her book. She hears this noise. She’s getting nervous. She tries the doors outside. They’re locked. Cue The Eerie Music by Amy Holden Joy’s brother.
Stephen: from Casio. It sounded like a Casio.
Rhys: And it was funny ’cause they were sitting on this panel and she, [00:43:00] the the actress Bri Stevens was saying she was being, she was there for only a week.
She was being paid $40 a day and not unlike Hatchet. Joseph, Allen Johnson, who played Neil was like, what? Because he only got $35 a day the whole production.
Stephen: We didn’t see his boobs.
Rhys: Exactly. We did not see his boobs. She’s walking around, she’s trying every door, they’re all locked. And then all of a sudden you have this mysterious figure in what my notes say in a Canadian tuxedo jeans and a jean jacket.
He’s coming up behind her. He is got this drill and he, the drill hits her in the arm and she runs off to escape. And we have this whole slasher chase scene going on. They’re running around, she’s flipping things, he’s chasing after her. But this is done with a handheld camera, which is an interesting take.
’cause a lot of times it’s like quick cuts, mounted cameras or [00:44:00] cameras on a dolly.
Stephen: Oh yeah.
Rhys: This is a really early use of the handheld going behind to just add like the whole shaky uncertainty of the whole scene, which I thought was,
Stephen: Which do you think they did that on purpose or it was let’s save money and do this in less takes with less equipment?
Rhys: so my original thought was. Your second choice there. But then when I found out that this was a real cinematographer working with them, this might have been a conscious decision.
Stephen: Yeah, or it might’ve been kinda a little of both.
Rhys: Yeah, a little bit of both.
Stephen: and I think this is a good way to solve that.
Rhys: Yeah. She hides this, she hides in this closet. It turns out it’s not a very good closet because it’s actually, you walk in and it’s the door leading into a cage of an equipment room.
Stephen: Right.
Rhys: So the killer goes into the equipment room and she’s hiding there so he can’t see her. She’s behind the counter, but like she can’t get out except the door she went through [00:45:00] and then she notices her arms bleeding
Stephen: A lot like there’s addle.
Rhys: Yes. She grabs a towel and puts it on her arm. It’s too late. The blood has run under the door. The killer sees it, drills through the lock. Now, if you ever find yourself in a situation where you have to drill through a lock, do not do it like he did. ’cause he drilled about three inches above the lock altogether, which isn’t gonna open a door for you.
But he does he drills out the lock. He hits her and I’m like, in my notes, I’m like, he’s just some guy. He’s in jeans, a denim jacket, red T-shirt, no masks, no burnt skin, no insane glove or machete. It’s just this guy with a drill.
Stephen: Yeah
Rhys: he walks in and she starts to scream and it cuts away to the gym.
And then you cut away to him running out of the van, running out to the van. So apparently he found a way in and out of the building after it was locked up, but she
Stephen: right. [00:46:00] Yeah. She was panicky. She had to run and fall down a couple times.
Rhys: Yes. We cut from there to some more of those nice environmental shots as Mark is dropping Tish off at Trish off at her house. Valerie has walked home and you can see that she’s the house right next door. And then you have Diane. She’s walking down the street and it’s shot from viewpoint of the car. Someone is following Diane in their car and you’re like, oh, the killer’s after her. And they get out and they walk up behind her and a hand grabs her on her shoulder and she does some move and flips the guy over.
And it’s her boyfriend, John.
Stephen: Yeah, they do a couple of those throughout some cheap jump scares that aren’t what you think.
Rhys: Yes. Very next scene, you have the coach driving home on the radio. The Russ Thorn murders again, she gets home. There’s like a repair vehicle on her street. She gets out, she fumbles with the keys and a drill comes through the door. You’re like, oh, it’s the killer. No, it’s her landlord putting in a new peephole.[00:47:00]
Stephen: Yeah, these would’ve been perfect in 3D.
Rhys: Yeah. Oh for sure. That the actress who played the landlord was literally just a set designer on set who did it. And it was really funny ’cause she drills through the door, they have a conversation, then she closes the door and the pee hole’s already in place.
Stephen: Yeah. I was like, wait a minute, you go leave a hole. And I’m like, wait a minute. Where’d that come from?
Rhys: fast work.
Stephen: that was an edited cutting floor scene there.
Rhys: Yes. There’s a knock at Tricia’s door. She’s on the phone with Diane. She goes over and finds the door ajar. Creepy, creepy.
Stephen: door.
Rhys: She shuts and locks the door, including the chain on the inside, and it seems really dark and she starts turning on the lights and one of the windows is open. And then she starts to play the piano and the camera pans away from the piano and we see there’s a figure walking through the house.
And it’s the killer after Trish? No, it’s the neighbor. He just stopped in to make sure everything’s [00:48:00] okay.
Stephen: Yeah. Which really made him out if he wasn’t a killer. He is definitely a creep boy, walking into this house with this girl. Oh, I thought there was something wrong.
Rhys: He came in for sure as some sort of creeper.
Stephen: He is misdirection. That’s all he is.
Rhys: Yes. And they keep doing this. You have somebody making a sandwich, they knock a bottle over and break some glass, and they’re walking around and it seems really creepy. And then there’s a cat. There’s a lot of those throughout this film. The boys are walking their bikes up the road saying they should go over and scare the girls that evening.
And they just happen to go past the tele telephone repair van. So the killer is already in the neighborhood. And as girls walk up the house, you can see there’s fa, there’s a face in the bushes. So the killer is already actually picked the house out and he is in place. The neighbor guy is inside having a cup of coffee, and the girls are walking in talking about how they have beer and weed, and Trisha’s trying to [00:49:00] get them to quiet down.
And the neighbor comes outta the kitchen and everyone’s Oop. And he’s I won’t tell your parents. Just don’t go crazy. And if you need me, I’ll be right next door. So they’re whipping up a big old picture of Kool-Aid. And I love it. It’s Valerie whipping up the Kool-Aid. It’s not Tricia and her friends and Valerie’s with her sister Courtney.
And she makes a Jim Jones joke, but drinking the Kool-Aid,
Stephen: because that’s the first thing I thought. I’m like, really? They got beer and other alcohol and weed and everything and they make Kool-Aid. How eighties is that?
Rhys: it also, like that joke was not like ancient history,
Stephen: No. Yeah,
Rhys: Jones thing was pretty recent.
But some of the other things that they did, for instance, I forgot to mention this, when he was chasing Linda around, there was like a sign on the thing that said, come join the drill team and stuff like that.
Little puns they put in the scenes. The ladies are passing around and [00:50:00] this rolled up joint. They’re eating some chips, there’s a noise outside. They get up as a collective unit, they head out to the kitchen and the noise was, they left a burner on with a glass coffee pot on it and it broke the coffee pot.
I’ve never put a glass coffee pot on a stove burner. But,
Stephen: No, that was a little weird
Rhys: There’s a jump scare ’cause someone’s at the window. It’s Diane.
Stephen: and she meant to scare him. Shut her face right on it. That was good.
Rhys: Valerie and her sister are sitting around reading magazines, which is something you used to do before cell phones and video games. You would read magazines in the newspaper.
Stephen: And it a girl slumber party trope.
Rhys: Yes. But this is Valerie and Courtney just in their house. A dog gets into the trash. Valerie gets up to clean it. She’s out in the dark alone. And her sister takes this opportunity to run upstairs and grab her secretly hidden copy of Playgirl Magazine with Sylvester Stallone on the cover.
Stephen: I thought that was funny too.
Rhys: Yeah. Valerie’s cleaning up the trash. She puts a brick in there. I don’t think [00:51:00] that’s gonna keep any dog from knocking over a trashcan. And as she’s walking back, you hear what sounds like a dog winding in pain. I’m like, Ooh, did the killer just kill the neighborhood barking dog? No, it’s just a metal swing swinging on a squeaky spring.
The whole thing it’s so funny ’cause there’s so many red herrings that all of a sudden when like legitimately somebody grabs this woman and pulls her into a van and kills her, it’s wow, that just, you’ve had so many fake outs. When the real thing comes up, it’s a little di more dis jarring.
Stephen: It like they’ve wanted to do this parody tongue in cheek making fun of almost. And at the same time though, they’re doing a pretty good slasher overall movie for the time period especially, so it balances it really well, I must say.
Rhys: It’s
Stephen: make fun of it, but,
Rhys: it’s not as fourth dimension breaking as the mask of Leslie Vernon, but it has that feel [00:52:00] where, this is actually a decent slasher film made in all of itself. All by itself.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. The only thing they needed was one of those shots with the silhouettes of people sitting in front of the movie theater and talking to the characters on screen or something.
Rhys: Yeah. The boys, Neil and Jeff are hanging out, looking through the window, all excited that they’re watching the girls as they just suddenly start to take their clothes off
Stephen: That was the trope for girls slumber parties, pillow fights, feathers and getting naked
Rhys: the camera like goes, does the creepy, oh, here’s each one of ’em.
Stephen: Course the they, these boys are like four feet away from them looking in the window right in the middle of the window. Nobody notices and they’re giggling and nobody knows.
Rhys: In fact, one girl comes over and dumps the ashtray out and the boys have to duck around the corner so they don’t get seen.
Stephen: right. Yeah. Physics are different in slumber parties
Rhys: Yes. Valerie’s back in the house walking through an apparently empty house, or her sister’s [00:53:00] missing. So she calls and she’s I’m doing biology homework. As she’s looking through her Playgirl magazine, she’s don’t take the centerfold out.
Stephen: This
Rhys: time. Yeah. Apparently it’s happened before. And then Tricia’s, they decide they’re gonna order pizza and they send Danielle out to get wood for the fire. And this time you can see the killer in the foreground as she goes inside. So we know that he’s in there.
Stephen: Whoa. She leaves the garage door open.
Rhys: You see this killer in the foreground holding this giant knife and you’re like, oh, it’s gonna start.
And no, it’s just creepy neighbor guy using a knife to kill snails.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: So yeah. The boys think they hear something and they’re just standing outside the window drinking beer. The girls are sitting around reading a newspaper. They’re going through their horoscopes. Tristan looks out the window and sees what she thinks is somebody lurking and she goes over and her baby doll has been stuffed, or her barbie’s been stuffed in the door.
It’s covered in blood. [00:54:00] The girls guess it’s the boys, but it makes Trish. Yeah, it makes Trish nervous. So she and Diane go out to close the garage door, then the lights go out. So they
Stephen: That’s, those guys were climbing on the phone poles or light poles.
Rhys: Yeah. So they have to go back out in the garage to check the fuse box. They’re taking flashlights, which don’t work again. Leslie Vernon’s put the batteries in there.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: They go out, they lock the garage door, but it’s, too late. There’s already somebody in there back at Valerie’s room. She and Courtney get in a fight over the magazine.
And that’s just a little break. We go back, Diane is using the phone in the other room. The other girls are listening to them. ’cause you could pick up the phone lines back then and listen to each other’s conversations. She’s talking to her boyfriend. She invites him over and the girls hear her say something and [00:55:00] they laugh and Diane catches them.
And that’s when the lights all go out. My bad.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: So they go out in the fuse boxes in the garage. And here it’s the boys, they’re about to go out in the garage and Diane comes out and jump scares them. Of course, they go outside, they’re carrying candles. Some of the fuses are missing.
Stephen: School fuses. It’s nothing like what we have now.
Rhys: Someone drops a flashlight and they pick it up to reveal that it’s Jeff standing in the garage.
They’re the ones who pulled the fuses. Ha. Funny prank. One of them hits him in the face hard enough to like bruise his eye. Power is restored. Yay. At Valerie’s, it sounds like the dog knocked the trash over again. She calls for her sister. She’s not responding. And I knew that brick wasn’t gonna keep the dog out, but she gets up.
On the way back, she stops to look at the squeaky swings after she picks the trash cans up and this hand reaches out to grab her. And it’s her sister carrying a [00:56:00] knife, Courtney, to scare her. Apparently their fight is over. They’re done fighting. They’re just we’re sisters again.
Stephen: Fake. Fake, fake out kills versus real kills is like two to one in this movie
Rhys: Yeah. There’s really only 12 kills in this movie.
Stephen: only.
Rhys: Yes. Diane’s boyfriend is out in the car by the house. He wants to go, but she can’t right now. So she opens the garage so he can pull the car into the garage and then
Stephen: not even her house.
Rhys: I know she closes the garage door. She doesn’t lock it back at her house. Valerie and her sister are doing their hair. Courtney really wants to go crash the party next door. Valerie doesn’t want anything to do with it. And Diane,
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: so you have.
Stephen: the murderer maybe, she has a sixth sense about it.
Rhys: You have three sets going on. You have Valerie’s house, you have Diane and the boyfriend in the seat of his car. And then we have the inside with the other three girls from the party. Oh. And the two boys who are just so [00:57:00] thrilled to be in there with the girls.
Stephen: Oh yeah.
Rhys: They tell Jeff he’s probably gonna have a shiner. They’re trying to find something to put on it. The only thing they can find is a hot dog, and he doesn’t wanna put a hot dog on his face. That’s stupid. Diane’s out with her boyfriend getting felt up and she’s we can’t do this. Everyone’s so close.
And he’s let’s just go. And she’s I’ll go ask. So she goes in to ask, she’s I’m gonna go get some beer. And Trisha’s fine, go get some beer. And so she is going to go out and tell her boyfriend that, Hey, we’re going to, we’re gonna go. She gets out there and she touches her boyfriend’s head, and it just falls right off his body.
Stephen: She I, she gives really good head. I’m 12 again
Rhys: the girls inside her making daiquiri so they don’t hear her scream. And they also don’t hear when the windshield gets shattered and the killer’s chasing her around with the drill. And [00:58:00] then you have this big it’s like the classic scene. If you ever see stills of this movie, it’s this giant phallic image of Diane on the floor, and then the killer’s legs, and then the drill in between his legs.
You don’t see the kill, it just cuts away.
Stephen: And so this killer brought the drill from the school, and he has to go somewhere to plug it in to use it with all the kill. That’s some work.
Rhys: It was supposed to be a battery powered drill,
Stephen: Oh, okay.
Rhys: but in 1982, the battery life on a drill with a bit that long would’ve been about three seconds. And
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: it.
Stephen: It’s huge. It’s
Rhys: Yeah
It’s a, it’s like a four foot long drill bit.
Stephen: yeah.
Rhys: Courtney hears the noises from next door, but they decide to blow it off inside.
They’re sitting around passing around daiquiris. The girls call coach the coach to find out who won the baseball game, which turned out to be [00:59:00] like a Mets game. All of the stats that they give about the game in this movie were legitimate to.
Stephen: Which I also found very interesting because it’s almost making fun of the guy type movies ’cause you don’t usually get girls wondering about and arguing about baseball stats and stuff. But I also loved how the coach did not look any older than the girls at this party.
Rhys: Yeah. So they’re on the phone with the coach when the doorbell rings and the guys are like, oh, we’ll take care of it. And it’s the pizza guy. So they walk over and they’re like, what’s the damage? They’re talking through the door and he says six, which it’s the serial killer and that’s how many people he’s killed.
It’s another little kind of joke. They get the money and they open the door, and the pizza guy’s eyes have been drilled out and he is still miraculously standing there holding a pizza. And he falls into
Stephen: well balanced.
Rhys: yes, he falls [01:00:00] into the.
Stephen: So the, he had to drill the guy’s eyes out with nobody hearing about it, and then turn the body, ’cause he had to have the body to get that big drill through the eyes and then turn the body around again. Talk to him and get away. This guy is like really good.
Rhys: He is,
Stephen: Leslie should have trained with him.
Rhys: Everybody screams when they and the coach hears the screams on the phone. Trish tries calling for help. She tries to get ahold of the police boss she’s talking to. Their thorn is cutting the wire on the outside. Coach calls Valerie ’cause she lives next door and asks Valerie if she’d go check because she thinks something’s up.
And Valerie’s I don’t think that’s a good idea. And the coach is oh, you know what? You’re right. I’m just gonna go check it out.
Stephen: Can you imagine nowadays if a coach called some kid to go to a neighbor’s house to check if there was a serial killer going on? Wow. That would not go well.
Rhys: Jeff and Neil decide they’re going to take off through opposite doors of the house to go run and get help. Not a bad [01:01:00] strategy,
Stephen: Right?
Rhys: because the killers in theory should only be able to get one of them.
Yeah. Except one of them takes off towards Valerie’s house. The other one goes in through the garage and doesn’t like, manage to even really open the door before the killer shows up.
Diane’s body falls down. He freaks out. The killer puts a drill through his chest.
Stephen: but doesn’t kill ’em.
Rhys: huh.
Stephen: Doesn’t kill ’em right away.
And this is again, where we get a lot of the tropes of, the kids doing stupid stuff to get themselves killed. It’s like, why the heck did you do that? Why are, they, there’s a lot of that in this one. It definitely, it helped give us all these tropes that we enjoyed today.
Rhys: Yeah, Jeff runs, gets outta the yard, gets to Valerie’s house and starts beating on the door. But Valerie’s in the back room watching a slasher film. She doesn’t hear him. Her sister’s upstairs on the phone. She doesn’t hear him, and instead of like just running onto the next house, he keeps beating [01:02:00] on that door until the killer finally just walks up and kills him.
Right outside of Valerie’s house?
Stephen: ’cause killers can’t run. They gotta do that. Menacing walk
Rhys: and he had a knife and they start fighting and the killer bites his hand. He drops the knife, he kills him with his own knife, and then picks his body up and takes it back to Trish’s house. And he goes back and opens the quietest garage door ever. And
Stephen: especially back then.
Rhys: yeah, opens the trunk and then actively counts the bodies.
And it turns out it’s only a four body trunk. You can’t fit another one in there. So he’s very disappointed by that,
Stephen: I love how he’s got ’em all just stuffed in the trunk. And I was looking, and it did not look like the one he was carrying was a dummy or anything. It could have been a dummy, but I’m like, are those like the real actors in there all all smed up together? I was like, that’s pretty funny.
Yeah, it looked like it. [01:03:00] Yeah.
Rhys: The girls are very smartly sitting back to back holding knives all of a sudden, until all of a sudden they’re not.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: They decide they’re hungry and the one girl comes over and gets a piece of pizza and the other two are like pretty disgusted by the fact that she’s just eating this pizza being held by a dead guy.
Stephen: Yeah. She’s so practical about everything
Rhys: Yeah. And then they hear something at the back door, and it’s Neil who didn’t die in the garage, but apparently he can’t stand. He’s crawled up
Stephen: because it got his shoulder that affects your legs.
Rhys: He’s there whimpering and they’re like too afraid to get to the door. And then we hear him scream and a drill and blood seeps under the door and they run away from the door. As Coach Jana drives across town at Val’s house, she’s looking for Courtney. Courtney is not around. She looks out the window and sees Courtney has gone over to Trisha’s house, so now she has to go over to get her sister from hanging out over [01:04:00] there. Courtney’s about to knock on the door when she hears somebody coming, her sister. So she hides in the bushes and she hides in the bushes. Valerie goes up, she knocks on the door. There’s nobody there. Oh, she knocks on the door and Jackie decides she has to go rescue her. She can’t just leave her out there, ’cause the killer’s there. And so Jackie goes to do that and she gets a drill across the throat, which kills her.
Stephen: Instantly. And she falls over and she’s dead.
Rhys: Yes. And so Valerie never does get in the house. She’s walking around the backyard looking for her sister and everything. Nobody answers. She looks down, she sees blood on the door and the stoop, and then Courtney jump scares her and she seems to forget about the blood.
Stephen: yeah, like you do. I love how the kid’s sister doesn’t know anything’s going on, but is like faking that she’s dead.
Rhys: Yes. So then she tells her sister to stay there and she goes around the [01:05:00] front door and she actually tries it and finds that it’s unlocked. And she goes inside she turns on this light and the girls hear her and Kim wants to answer. And Trish’s no, we’ve gotta be quiet. ’cause they barricaded themselves in Trisha’s room.
Valerie’s walking through the house. She opens the door of the patio, but Courtney’s not there now. Leaving her there apparently wasn’t a good idea.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: Kim and Trisha are in their bedroom talking. They don’t even notice that the killer is just very quietly crawling through the window with the drill.
Stephen: Yeah, he, yeah. That’s easy to do. Crawl through a window and not make a single bit of sound.
Rhys: He’s fondling his drill as he approaches them.
Stephen: It’s a pretty classic, like fun because it’s creeping up slowly behind them. I’ll talk about tropes.
Rhys: Until it hits that squeaky floorboard. Then you have that Scooby Doo moment where they both go R
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: back at him. And they do things really well. Kim starts [01:06:00] throwing stuff at him. He goes over to Kim. Trish grabs a bat and hits him and knocks him down. And then here’s where they screw up. They’re like, we gotta get outta here.
And they start moving stuff away from the door. Just beat him with a bat until he doesn’t get back up.
Stephen: Same thing I thought of, I hit him once and he’s down. So we can get outta here now. No, his brains are not oozing on the floor yet. Hit him a few more times.
Rhys: keep going. If you’re going, if you’re squeamish about killing him, a couple to the ankles, he’s not getting back up.
Stephen: yeah, exactly.
Rhys: the wrists too. He is not gonna grab a drill.
Stephen: Get his jaw.
Rhys: But that’s always my, that’s always my gripe in every slasher film. It’s like
Stephen: If they did that it’s the same thing as if they had cell phones. They’d just call the police and they would’ve been here eons ago.
Rhys: he grabs a knife that one of the girls was holding and he stabs Kim with it and Trish’s I’m out. And she just takes off.
Stephen: Yeah. Loyalty only goes [01:07:00] so far.
Rhys: Yes. Valerie is going around the back patio looking for a sister. The killer’s walking through the hall in the house looking for Trish. He goes into the bathroom and then there’s this really creepy scene where he sees himself in the mirror and there’s this half a second of psychotic self-realization of what’s going on.
And then he just goes, he just leaves. He does do the shower curtain thing, but there’s nobody inside in the shower, in the
Stephen: They really needed when he did that.
Rhys: Yes. Valerie’s looking for Courtney and she finds her lying on the ground and then she sits up acting like a va, a zombie. If it was me, I would’ve beat the shit outta my little sibling if
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: And I was the younger brother. It takes a lot for me to say that, but the girls go back to lock the front door and then plan on heading back to their house.
The killer is walking through the house playing cat and mouse with Tricia. He goes in the bedroom, looks in the closet, he doesn’t see her. She’s hiding in one of those large garment bags, which I have a couple of those. I don’t know that [01:08:00] I could actually fit in one, but so Valerie and Courtney are in the kitchen saying how they’re just going to go and Courtney keeps opening the fridge like she wants to get food out and Valerie’s no.
And so she closes the door without looking at it, and then she opens it again. Every time she does, Valerie’s body has been, or not Valerie. Kim’s body has been stuffed in there and it leans forward and then she closes it. It’s humorous. The poor actress, the only way she could actually maintain that was to hang onto the light bulb.
So she burt her hand doing those scenes?
Stephen: And it is funny because naturally she would’ve glanced down to look in that fridge after. That’s just what you do when you open that door. You’re never going to just open it and go like this four times.
Rhys: Yes. And what ends up happening is they do it twice and you’re like, oh, okay. Ha. And they’re gonna leave. But then Courtney insists that she wants to steal a beer or something, and she opens it, Kim’s body falls out, [01:09:00] they scream. And then Valerie runs down in the basement and Courtney seemingly vanishes.
It turns out she’s hiding under the couch. The killer takes the pizza boy’s body, which was covered with a blanket, tosses it down the stairs and then covers himself up with a blanket like he’s the body and just lays there.
Stephen: I thought that was hilarious and such genius for these psychos,
Rhys: it’s a good strategy, unfortunately for him. Courtney’s hiding under the couch like two feet away. She sees him do this. Coach is outside and she’s knocking at the door. She comes inside and realizes that something’s wrong. She sees this body lying on the floor. She, I’m sure she thinks it’s some kind of prank.
She goes over and she goes down to pull the blanket back and Courtney doesn’t warn her,
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: she’s just being quiet. Little Mouse, the killer gets up, she grabs a fire poker and she’s, [01:10:00] she’s not some high school kid.
Stephen: She just looks like one
Rhys: Yeah, they’re gonna duke it out. Valerie’s downstairs looking for tools to attack with.
She grabs a circular saw, runs with it to the steps just as it comes, unplugged and it turns itself off, which is
Stephen: that, that was pretty good too.
Rhys: Don’t run with a running circular. Saw kids.
Stephen: Yep. That’s the
Rhys: There’s our safety tip for the day. That, and if you hit a killer with a baseball batt, make sure to finish the job.
Stephen: three times at
Rhys: Yes. The coach is back backing up there doing this whole dual in the living room.
The killer’s advancing. He is testing her defenses and Courtney sticks a foot out from under the couch and trips him. He falls in, the coach repeatedly, beats him with a fire poker, and then Trish comes running out of the, outta the kitchen with a knife and just starts stabbing him. And in response, he starts thrashing about, he hits the gym teacher with the drill, which rips her belly [01:11:00] open amazingly.
Stephen: She falls dead immediately
Rhys: yeah I don’t know if you’ve ever hit fabric with a drill, but it binds really fast. So I don’t think it would’ve gone through a shirt, but that’s
Stephen: and there were no guts flowing out. So I don’t think she would’ve died that quickly.
Rhys: again, small budget
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: of downstairs. Valerie grabs a machete thorn gets up and gives his monologue now, and literally this is his, this, these are like his only lines. You are pretty, all of you were very pretty. I love you. It takes a lot of love for a person to do this. You want it, you love it.
Yes. Those are his lines through the whole movie.
Stephen: I wonder how long it took them to memorize those.
Rhys: I, I wouldn’t be surprised if he came up with him on his own
Stephen: It could have
Rhys: because he was so in character.
Stephen: Yeah,
Rhys: Valerie comes up the stairs with a machete and Thorn [01:12:00] is getting outta the house, not scared, but moving to somewhere where he has more place to fight and they start to fight by the pool.
And she figuratively emasculates him by breaking his drill bit with the machete. That’s legit. Those bits, especially those long ones, are always breaking.
Then she cuts off his hand with a machete.
Stephen: yeah. That I was like, wow. She’s like super strong.
Rhys: She slices open his but body, belly and he falls into the pool. Amy Holden Joy said We ruined that pool, so whatever they were using corn syrup,
Stephen: Oh.
Rhys: For the blood and like into the pump and just like completely destroyed the pool. And, vallejo doesn’t know how to swim. And so he hated that scene ’cause he had to sit there and float all this time while they were filming, not being able to swim.
Super nervous about the whole thing.
Stephen: yeah, I bet.
Rhys: The movie was supposed to have ended in the living room, but Corman loved [01:13:00] it so much. He gave her extra money and said, no, just keep it going. Which is why they take him out in the living room and then he gets back up, they go out to the patio, they fight, they take him out in the patio, then he gets out of the pool.
So it just it’s that rush song that just doesn’t know when to end. It just keeps going and going.
Stephen: I wondered about that because I’m like, oh, they even did this little cinematic moment with her coming, running out, and then it didn’t end and it just, it felt Lord of the Rings oh, it’s ending. No, it’s not. Oh, it’s ending. No, it’s not. Oh, it’s ending.
Rhys: He loved it. It takes the combined forces of Trish, Courtney, and Valerie to finally knock him back to the point where he makes this final diving attack and impales himself on the machete. And you show all three girls crying like each one of their faces crying, crying, roll credits.
Stephen: Yeah, so we, we had more than one final girl.
Rhys: we did, we ended up with [01:14:00] three.
Stephen: Does that count? Courtney?
Little one? Yeah.
Rhys: she did contribute, but
Stephen: A final girl in training.
Rhys: yes, two and a half final girls. But I thought really interesting too, like they used a machete, a nod to Friday the 13th. You had the whole thing. The ridiculousness of, oh, hey, I’ve been sliced in the belly and I’m missing my hand and I’m gonna crawl out of this pool and still effectively fight off three of you.
It certainly a big nod to the whole thing. When this screened for the first time in California Amy Holden Joy was there with Corman and like the audience loved it, they were making drilling noises and talking to the screen, and when it finished, she turned to him and she’s what have we released?
And he’s just the best slasher movie ever. So like she was a little nervous about the reception and he was just, he is he saw the dollar signs. So
Stephen: No, you, [01:15:00] Carmen, everybody in the horn knows his name,
Rhys: they do ridiculously successful producer over time.
Stephen: Yeah. Not saying everything’s a hit, but never has to be. It never is,
Rhys: It’s true. And it’s significant enough that it’s one of those B rated slasher films that we still talk about, like Sleepaway camp, all those ones that aren’t the big three that still were around at the time. And you’re like, oh, hey man, you remember seeing slumber party massacre?
Oh yeah, I remember that. So
Stephen: And we’ve been joking about the tropes. Arguably, some of these add to the tropes way more than Halloween or Friday, 13th and Freddy. They set all these tropes that everybody knows and talks about and jokes about.
Rhys: they did. They did a whole lot to flesh out the entire genre and they don’t really get as enough recognition for it.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah, so well we men, I mentioned Black Christmas earlier, that’s another one [01:16:00] in the similar vein here. So anyone watching it go watch that one. But I’ll also mention today, RL Stein’s Pumpkin Head is being released. And you know what? It’s being released on Tuby.
Rhys: Oh wow. World release onto Tubi.
Stephen: Yeah.
So I thought that was pretty cool to learn that. So there you go.
Rhys: Yeah, and if you heard our last episode on sensor I was telling Steve, I went through and looked up the list of video nasties and just decided I was gonna watch them alphabetically as I came across them, I watched the first one and it was just so poorly done. I just, I was like, okay, I can’t do this project because once I start a bad movie, I have to finish it and I’m like, if I’m, what is it?
88 titles, I’m, there’s no way I myself to.
Stephen: You should just maybe look up the scenes that cause them to be banned or whatever, and watch the scenes. I’m sure you can find
Rhys: that. I don’t know that necessarily they have that information out there, but
Stephen: Yeah. Maybe somebody [01:17:00] might. I know somebody does, but you gotta get it. All right, there we go. Do we know what’s next?
Rhys: we do. We are going back to France for a film from 2009 called Amer, and it is not a new French extremity film.
Stephen: Oh
Rhys: It is a French JAO film,
Stephen: wow. Okay.
Rhys: which is crazy ’cause whenever you actually talk about JAO films, you’re always talking Italy. This is like an absolute nod to Argento, so
Stephen: Nice, nice. And we’re going to have our annual Halloween hon, coming up. We got some good movies picked out. We’ll do a quick little bonus episode, talking about those here soon too. We’ll probably throw it in right around Halloween time all right man. Very good, fun times. Talk to you later.
Rhys: See ya.
