The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982) ***
Coming across the beloved cult film that was once not so beloved just might be the biggest hazard of movie spectatorship these days.

You better not ride on the general train of thought from the film’s original release or you just might get bludgeoned in the comments section by devotees of the cinematic item under discussion.

You have no taste! You’re an idiot! You just don’t get it! You’re too stupid to understand the undeniable genius! Blah blah blah!

I am thinking first and foremost about films like Halloween III, Howard the Duck, Sleepaway Camp, and Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Maybe you are reading my confession why I had not watched The Slumber Party Massacre until very recently.

I finally caught up with it on Halloween night 2022, I liked it well enough, and I can definitely understand why it’s held in such high esteem in some quarters though I certainly don’t like it as much as others so enthusiastically do.

The Slumber Party Massacre took a while to get started, packed with so many false alarms and jump scares that I began losing patience early on and it was not until the 45- or 50-minute mark that I became enveloped in suspense. The final 25-30 minutes are especially well-made and filled with plenty of impacting moments, so much so that I almost bumped The Slumber Party Massacre up to three-and-a-half stars even after the mixed reaction to the first two-thirds of the film.

All slasher films, whether it be the good, the bad or the ugly, have their gimmicks, be it their setting or their killer in everything from the favorite weapon of choice down to style.

The Slumber Party Massacre sold a good amount on the fact that it has a female director (Amy Holden Jones) and a feminist screenwriter (Rita Mae Brown), something not common for the horror genre overall and specifically the subgenre of the slasher.

Jones shows definite talent in her directorial debut, and it’s no surprise she later directed Love Letters, Maid to Order, and The Rich Man’s Wife and received screenwriting credits on Love Letters, Maid to Order, Mystic Pizza, Beethoven, Indecent Proposal, The Getaway (1994), and The Relic. She also married acclaimed cinematographer Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Fugitive) in 1980 and stayed his wife until his death in September 2020.

Brown intended The Slumber Party Massacre to be a satire of the slasher genre, but Jones filmed it as straight horror.

However, satirical traces remain throughout The Slumber Party Massacre.Virtually all the male characters are super horny creeps and more than one female character survives all the murder and mayhem, for example.

Never mind that escaped serial killer Russ Thorn (Michael Villella) walks around in plain sight without a mask from the first scene on. He’s also one of a select few slasher film killers with quotes on the Internet Movie Database. Eat your heart out, Jason and Michael!

Also, never mind Thorn’s weapon of choice that could possibly be some kind of metaphor. Yes, it’s a power drill and I’m not sure of the symbology there! I also don’t believe there’s any greater meaning in the ways he meets his inevitable demise at the end of the movie.

The local radio station announces Thorn’s escape more than once, yet nobody seems to notice let alone care until it’s (almost) too late. I seem to remember one of the characters shutting off her car radio in the middle of one of the announcements.

Nearly all the characters are too preoccupied with their pursuits of pleasure at this very moment in time, just like the characters in any Friday the 13th film, to be concerned about some homicidal maniac on a rampage.

These satirical traces make The Slumber Party Massacre a good deal more interesting than, let’s say, Madman and The Prowler.

It works as both a satire and a straight horror film nearly 15 years before Scream came out.

In fact, not that I want to shout about it or anything, The Slumber Party Massacre works better than Scream.

Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)

SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY (2021) *
I am not exactly sure why I decided to watch Space Jam: A New Legacy on a Saturday afternoon, following hot on the heels of the Disney live-action films Midnight Madness and Condorman.

I mean, I am not the biggest fan of the original Space Jam from 1996, basically a feature-length advertisement for the greatness of Michael Jordan with Looney Tunes and Bill Murray and Wayne Knight and everybody else guest stars or glorified cameos. Never thought it was all that great even back during the height of the Chicago Bulls — Space Jam came out Nov. 15, 1996, just a few months after the Bulls put together a 72-10 regular season and won an NBA title — and it has aged worse. Of course, it seems to have a major cult following, but then again, so does Howard the Duck.

Also, I have never been much of a LeBron James fan, since his arrival upon the scene in 2002. I’ve never cared for his style of play, his flopping and floundering about like he’s been shot when selling a foul despite the fact that he’s easily the size of an NFL tight end and bigger than most NBA players, his celebratory antics, his aping Michael Jordan from the shoes, money, and the uniform number to the chalk toss and now his very own Space Jam movie, his ring chasing and team hopping, and his outright hijacking of ESPN for the last two decades. He’s arguably been even more omnipresent in our lives than Jordan, one of the most famous people in the world during his glory days in the ’90s, given the social media factor.

For example, I liked and shared one LeBron traveling GIF, and the Facebook algorithms just won’t show me any mercy in the two or three years since. LeBron this, LeBron that, just because I thought it was funny to see LeBron travel across the desert with basketball in hand. Now, I have to see a brilliant quote like this one, I don’t give a fuck what nobody think. I’m him. I get shit for making the right play. Four motherfuckers on me. Motherfucker wide open right here. We are a team and I trust them. Why wouldn’t I have thrown it to them? I don’t care about the results. What?

Anyway.

You guessed it, Space Jam: A New Legacy is a $150 million and 1-hour, 55-minute advertisement for the greatness of LeBron James.

You can even play a drinking game with A New Legacy: Take a swig of the sauce every time you hear King James. It’s a lot safer than drinking every time they say Carol Anne in Poltergeist III or Cheech and Chong utter Hey, man in Up in Smoke.

I found very little to like in A New Legacy. A lot of the movie felt like watching a mash up of the plots from Hook and Space Jam. Also, the Looney Tunes more or less serve LeBron James and his greatness, aside from very fleeting isolated moments that don’t add up to any of the Looney Tunes shorts like Duck Amuck or The Great Piggy Bank Robbery or Porky in Wackyland or You Ought to Be in Pictures or any number of the brilliant shorts of the ’40s and ’50s.

Wile E. Coyote proves though he could be ideal halftime entertainment.

I absolutely hated what they did with all the Warner Brothers intellectual properties: Turn them into fans in The Big Game that closes out the picture. I mean, seriously, do you take King Kong or Pennywise for a basketball fan? I don’t see Pennywise cheering for anything. Come on, man. I didn’t catch Dirty Harry or Rick Deckard or Stanley Kowalski or Jack Torrance or Pazuzu in the crowd, but I sincerely hope that doesn’t mean we’ll see them in Space Jam 3.

I must admit to rooting for the villains, or the goons, during A New Legacy and found the greatest entertainment when they dunked on LeBron real good in the first half.

Of course, I understood the second half would take a dramatic turn and give us a great big happy ending for LeBron and his celluloid family. Wasn’t it cast in stone?

I just hope that LeBron (and his legion of fans) do not try and count his victory in A New Legacy toward his NBA titles.

Howard the Duck (1986)

HOWARD THE DUCK (1986) One star

KODE-TV in Joplin once aired movies on Saturday nights and I recall watching THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, THE BREAKFAST CLUB, WOLFEN, and HOWARD THE DUCK in my impetuous youth.

Sometimes movies that we liked during our childhood and teenage years do not hold up during later viewings. Unfortunately, I do not remember how I reacted to HOWARD THE DUCK upon first viewing it some 30 years ago.

I do know that I caught up with HOWARD THE DUCK in 2009, though, wrote a negative review centered around the question “What were they thinking?” when Universal Pictures made HOWARD THE DUCK, and listed it as one of the worst movies of the 1980s, right down there with such “classics” as LEONARD PART 6 and THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS.

That’s when I first encountered online defenders of bad movies. They’re vehement, and will leave you digital pleasantries like, for example, “Opinions are like assholes. …” Genius, pure genius, never heard that one before, Internet tough guy. I mean, how dare somebody think both HOWARD THE DUCK and LEONARD PART 6 stink it up. HOWARD THE DUCK and LEONARD PART 6 are both not so bad they’re good, they’re both so bad that they’re really really really bad. Every once in a great while, I dust them off just to remember what a bad movie plays like.

HOWARD THE DUCK is one of the great cinematic follies of all-time.

It wanted dearly to be like GHOSTBUSTERS, a combination of dazzling special effects and wisecracking comedy.

It fails in both departments and it starts with that live action duck, the biggest special effect mistake and comedic failure.

Howard’s a creepy little duck, a rather fowl protagonist despite the fact that director Willard Huyck (Huyck rhyme with duck?) and producer Gloria Katz toned him down and tried making him a nicer duck from his comic book origins.

It does not help the character that the film trots out every duck pun for 111 minutes, a running time a few minutes longer than GHOSTBUSTERS. Every single character must get at least one and I got tired of all the puns by the 5-minute mark.

Eight actors are credited as having some role in playing Howard the Duck: Ed Gale, Chip Zien, Tim Rose, Steve Sleap, Peter Baird, Mary Wells, Lisa Sturz, and Jordan Prentice. Six of the actors and actresses inside the duck suit (at different times) won the Razzie for Worst Performance in a Motion Picture. This is almost as impressive as the fact Harvey Stephens began his career as the Antichrist in THE OMEN. Where does one go from the Antichrist and where does one go from Howard the Duck? These are tough questions, and I have some more.

Do those actors and actresses put Howard the Duck on their resume? Or brag down at the pub “Oh yeah, man, you better not fuck with Howard the Duck” and “I played a talking duck from another planet in the movies. How about you, asshole, what the fuck have you done that’s so great?” Have any of these actors exploited their playing Howard the Duck to pick up women? Stranger lines have been spouted.

Howard’s not a funny duck and he must try a thousand jokes. He’s a lame duck, instead, that wishes he could have been the Groucho Marx or Bill Murray of ducks.

The last 40-45 minutes surrender to chase scenes and special effect showcases with lame duck pun interludes, then we’re treated to a thrilling grand finale of the “Howard the Duck” song, written by Thomas “She Blinded Me with Science” Dolby and George “Atomic Dog” Clinton.

The last 40-45 minutes feel like they run on as long as BEN-HUR and GONE WITH THE WIND combined.

Every time I see Lea Thompson, it brings me back to the strange trajectory of her early screen career: attacked by shark in JAWS 3-D, a creepy love affair with a married police officer who should have arrested himself for sex crimes in THE WILD LIFE, and unknowingly lusting after her own future son in BACK TO THE FUTURE. In HOWARD THE DUCK, the fetching Thompson smooches Howard all while she’s in her skimpies. It’s bad enough that her hairdo attacked the ozone layer, but she has to go the extra mile in HOWARD THE DUCK.

(We believe that Thompson’s hairdo in HOWARD THE DUCK contributed to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer that became effective in August 1989.)

Every time I watch HOWARD THE DUCK, I marvel at the fact that Tim Robbins somehow survived his performance and managed to sustain a career in such high-quality films as BULL DURHAM, JACOB’S LADDER, and THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. His performance in HOWARD THE DUCK ranks among the most annoying supporting performances in history. Believe it or not, this was his fifth credited screen performance … and we have one more believe it or not.

HOWARD THE DUCK is the first feature-length Marvel Comics adaptation. When will Disney take a crack at remaking this remedial GHOSTBUSTERS?