Schelaine Bennett

(On TV, October 2021) As someone who’s most definitely not a fan of slasher horror films, I never asked for a Slumber Party Massacre remake and openly question why such a thing needed to exist. Why resurrect this misogynistic, exploitative, brain-dead genre? The first few minutes of the remake offer no answer—in fact, they ask the question more loudly, as writer Suzanne Keilly and director Danishka Esterhazy offer nothing more than a contemporary remake of exactly the kind of film I dislike, as a drill-equipped killer goes around ludicrously slaughtering three likable young women. But that’s far from being the entire film, and as the prologue goes past, the pieces are put in place for a far wittier follow-up. Twenty years later, the sole survivor of the massacre has a daughter, and the young woman is heading out for a weekend of slumber party fun with a few friends. Alas, the car breaks down, the creepy locals redirect them to a cabin around the lake of her mom’s massacre, and they strip down to their underwear… But hold your groans just a few minutes longer, because, as the unexpected fifth member of their party soon learns, they’re not there for alcohol and pillow fights: they have knives hidden underneath the pillows and are deliberately awaiting the killer to strike again so they can take revenge. This initial twist out of the way, this Slumber Party Massacre remake becomes far more interesting—although slightly too forced to be entirely likable. Oh, there’s some fun in having a few young men from across the lake step by the cabin to check if the girls are OK and being spooked by the knives lying around… just as there are more laughs to be had in having the girls go warn the guys about psycho killers while they’re having a good old pillow fight among bros. Then there’s a shower scene that flips the whole male-gaze thing on its head. But in trying to subvert, this Slumber Party Massacre often goes too far and too bluntly: The shower scene goes on and on after making its (hilarious) point, blunting its punchline. The dialogue also pushes its agenda with on-the-nose dialogue filled with buzzwords that no one would reasonably say in real life. The messaging of the film also distracts from some elementary problems in terms of staging and plausibility: Bringing knives rather than guns to a psycho fight is a stupid idea, and no amount of phallic meta-cleverness is going to convince me that a character can drive an inch-wide drill bit through another human body barehanded. Then there’s the fact that Slumber Party Massacre remains a slasher, and a gory one at that—there’s a limit to how far my appreciation can go when it’s still about violent deaths and unexamined assumptions about violence. (The film does hint at its awareness of its lead characters’ unsettling thirst for violent revenge, but doesn’t do much about it because it’s a slasher after all.)  Despite its female gaze, the film couldn’t keep me from liking Hannah Gonera and Schelaine Bennett in their roles as a dynamic mother/daughter team. I’m slightly amazed that the film was produced for TV (as a Syfy premiere, but widely available on a variety of other channels even up here in Canada) because this Slumber Party Massacre is easily better than the original—at least in the amount of cleverness that went into addressing the flaws of slasher films in a far less forgiving society. Don’t quit before the prologue is done, though—in fact, you may want to skip ahead to the title card and see how it goes from there.