Review #308: Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #25- Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)

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Unfortunately I don't remember my first viewing of this movie- my earliest memory of it was reading someone else's review that made us laugh so much my wife and I still quote it to this day. (It was short- I'll include the entire review down below.) Slumber Party Massacre II is very much an outlier in this series for being so completely balls-to-the-wall insane in several different ways, which is both a good and a bad thing.

The plot is a lot less straightforward (but also kind of meaningless) than the last one. It follows Courtney, the annoying little sister from the first movie, who several years later is still living with the trauma of surviving an encounter with the drill-wielding maniac that killed all of the neighbor's friends. Trying to live a normal life, Courtney goes with her friends to a slumber party weekend at a friend's dad's condo- they do the usual stuff: drinking, dancing, having topless wine fights, swimming with a blow-up doll, you know. As expected, the boys crash the party and it seems everything is going great, except... Courtney keeps having these dreams, where this strange man with a drill coming out of the end of a guitar keeps showing up and quoting song lyrics at her. And the dreams start getting more and more disruptive, and eventually start getting more and more real- until this man shows up in the real world, and kills everybody for real. Or was it a dream? No, it wasn't. Or maybe it was! Or maybe it wasn't. Or maybe Courtney has been crazy the whole time!

This film is, in one word, bonkers. On one hand I really like movies where you're never quite sure what's real and what isn't (and this one certainly fits that bill)- but this one goes so far that I don't even know what the heck I'm watching. The killer makes no sense, comes out of nowhere, goes nowhere, goes everywhere, and everything is this insane fever dream but also the movie tries to give it all of this weight so the only conclusion I can come to is that yes, Courtney somehow manifested a dude with a guitar-drill out of her dreams and he proceeded to physically kill everyone. No the previous movie did not have any supernatural elements whatsoever. No the third movie will not have any supernatural elements whatsoever. This one is just, as I said, completely bonkers.

I don't think I fully realized until this viewing that this movie is connected to the previous one. (I'm sure I knew it on some level, considering the first few minutes shows footage from the previous movie and then it deals so much with Courtney's older sister being in an asylum because of her trauma from the previous movie, but I dunno, I never fully grasped it until now.) This is probably because of how completely disconnected it feels, due to the aforementioned bonkers dream-logic that the entire movie relies so heavily on. 

I also don't understand what the heck this movie is even about. Every time Courtney has a dream/vision of her sister, her sister urges her not to "go all the way" so obviously it has something to do with sex and abstinence. But like... to what end? Sure I guess the killer finally comes to life for real when Courtney and her crush are making out and are probably about to have sex, but... why? If they went ahead and did the deed and then the killer shows up while it's going on, that would be one thing- but the two of them are fully-clothed when he appears. It also would have helped if each of her previous dreams/visions of the killer happened sometime when she was really horny, or when her friends were having sex around her, or something? Maybe one time that's the case (I guess she does have one nightmare while her friends are having sex in the next room) but other times she's just taking a bath or getting some food out of the fridge or sitting in the car and then she has a vision of the guitar-wielding murderer. If this movie is trying to make a statement about something, I'm sorry, I just don't get what that statement is.

But really, this movie is still a ton of fun. The characters are all ridiculous but none of them are intentionally unlikable like so many other slashers (where they want you to root for the killer to punish them for being bad people). The setting is fun, the pacing is pretty good, and the effects and kills are clever. The guitar with a drill on the end is something you have never seen and will never see anywhere else, because it's so incredibly bonkers. Nothing makes sense but I mean that in the best possible way.

I highly recommend this film.

Overall Rating: 7/10 Dudes Lounging Shirtless on the Phone

Nostalgic Rating: 9/10 Unnecessary Musical Numbers

Alternate Review: Many years back I read a review on IMDB that I'm going to share here in full. It was written by user rustind-2, who gave it an 8/10:

"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!"