Slumber Party Massacre (2021) Review: A Flipped Male Gaze

Slumber Party Massacre review: a slasher that knows its history

The film opens on a scene anyone who has seen a slasher will recognize. It is late evening at a lake cabin, and a group of teenage girls dance, drink, smoke weed and talk about boys. The camera lingers in the way that horror cameras of the 1980s did, and somewhere in the distance a killer watches. The audience is watching from the same position, and the movie wants them to notice that.

That opening is the formula of nearly every slasher ever made, and it is also the start of this version. The 2021 Slumber Party Massacre is a modern reimagining and stand-alone sequel to the 1982 original, which was directed by Amy Holden Jones and written by Rita Mae Brown as a parody of the slasher genre. The earlier film was co-financed through the Roger Corman organization, and its nudity reflected the commercial expectations of the time. Esterhazy’s version keeps the parody and pushes it further.

Danishka Esterhazy directs, working from a script by Suzanne Keilly. The film premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, on September 27, 2021, and reached Syfy on October 16. Hannah Gonera plays Dana Devereaux, with Frances Sholto-Douglas, Alex McGregor, Mila Rayne and Reze-Tiana Wessels as her friends. Schelaine Bennett plays Trish Devereaux, Rob van Vuuren plays the killer Russ Thorn, and Jennifer Steyn plays Kay Thorn.

The cabin-in-the-woods setting has a long history. Halloween in 1978 and Friday the 13th in 1980 fixed the pattern of teenage victims, a watching killer and a survivor who outlasts everyone else, and critic Carol J. Clover named that survivor the final girl in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws. The 1982 Slumber Party Massacre arrived in the middle of that boom, and it was followed by sequels in 1987 and 1990. The remake picks up the conversation after decades of the formula being repeated.

A Slumber Party Massacre review has to start with the premise, because the premise is the joke. The opening sets up the genre’s best-known conventions, lingering shots of female bodies, a slumber party with oversized pizza slices and a debate about superheroes, and then spends the rest of the film dismantling them. Esterhazy handles it with affection. The film knows what it is poking fun at, and it respects the people who loved the genre first.

The nudity and the flipped gaze

The film’s most talked-about choice is what it does with nudity. In the classic slasher, female skin is a given. Here, the script gets flipped, and the men become the objects. Ditzy, extremely fit young men have pillow fights that show off their abs and shower scenes shot in slow motion, with close-ups that are framed to pass cable censors. The movie borrows the language of exploitation cinema and uses it to make a point about who the camera usually serves.

The result is funny in a way that is hard to explain without spoiling the particulars. The movie is less interested in shock than in the question of whose fantasy is being served. By giving the male characters the role the genre traditionally gave to women, it exposes how much of the old formula relied on a single viewpoint. It also keeps the equal-opportunity balance: nobody is safe from the camera, and nobody is spared from the killer.

The horror itself

The nudity question deserves a closer look, because it is where the film is easiest to misunderstand. A viewer expecting the usual exploitation will see the opening and think the movie is following the old rules. A viewer who stays will realize that the opening is bait. The camera is doing what it always did, and then the film shows the cost of that habit by making the men the target of the same attention. The comedy depends on the contrast, and the contrast depends on the audience knowing what the original conventions were.

The kills are gruesome but inventive, more creative than cringeworthy, and the plot hits the beats a teen horror fan expects. The character motivations hold up well alongside strong entries in the field such as Happy Death Day, and alongside Esterhazy’s earlier work for Syfy, The Banana Splits Movie. The best surprise is how the movie pivots on slasher meta-commentary, heading in a completely different direction from the one the opening suggests.

One complaint stands out. For anyone who watches a lot of horror, the scares are familiar. The film is smarter about the genre than it is frightening within it.

The women support each other

A pleasant surprise is how the women behave. They support each other, and they are not set against one another for the attention of a man. That choice runs through the whole film, and it matches the original’s approach: the film takes a fresh approach to the final girl, one that gives the women more to do than run.

The cast commits to all of it, including the intentionally bad moments, which are placed with care. The actresses play the parody straight enough that the jokes land, and the tone stays consistent.

Slumber Party Massacre (2021) at a glance

• Director: Danishka Esterhazy.
• Writer: Suzanne Keilly.
• Premiere: Fantastic Fest, September 27, 2021; Syfy, October 16, 2021.
• Relation to the original: reimagining and stand-alone sequel to the 1982 film written by Rita Mae Brown.
• Lead cast: Hannah Gonera, Frances Sholto-Douglas, Alex McGregor, Mila Rayne and Reze-Tiana Wessels.

Verdict: how the remake compares with the original

The movie succeeds because it understands the thing it is remaking. The 1982 film was already a feminist parody of the slasher form, made at a time when the genre’s politics were rarely questioned. The new version takes what worked, doubles down on a female-led story and finds new ways to play with the final girl.

What the film avoids is cruelty. A remake that mocks its own genre can slip into mocking its audience, and Esterhazy’s version mostly stays on the right side of that line. The nudity is silly, not sleazy, and the men who are on display are in on the joke. The women who survive do so because they are smart and because they work together.

There is some obvious contemporary framing. The film knows it is making a point about toxic masculinity and the male gaze, and it is happy to be loud about it. Not every viewer will enjoy the commentary, but it is built into the jokes and rarely stops the film from moving.

The scale of the production is modest, and it is worth saying so. This is a cable-network horror film with a limited budget, and its ambitions are matched to that reality. It does not try for elaborate effects or sweeping locations. It stays in a cabin, a forest and a few well-chosen set pieces, and it spends its energy on character and joke construction. That restraint is part of why it feels like the work of people who knew exactly what they were making.

For viewers choosing between this and the 1982 original, the two make a good double bill. The earlier film shows how a slasher could be made by women with a satirical eye, and the newer one shows how that approach can be updated for an audience that now recognizes every trope. Seeing them back to back, it becomes clear how much of the genre’s history is a conversation, and how often the best entries are the ones that talk back.

A brief word on tone. The film is not trying to be a prestige horror drama, and it is not a pure comedy either. It lives in the space between, where the jokes are about the form itself and the kills are real enough to keep the stakes alive. That balance is hard to hit, and the movie hits it more often than it misses. The pacing is brisk, the dialogue is playful and the cast plays along with the genre’s conventions.

The practical advice is that expectations matter. A viewer who knows slasher conventions will get the most out of it, because the film depends on recognizing what it is flipping. A viewer who wants straight horror will find a lighter, funnier film than the title suggests. For what it is, a Syfy original with a point of view, it is a good time.

This remake does what a Slumber Party Massacre should: it looks at the genre’s habits with a raised eyebrow, then makes something better from them.

Sources

• Slumber Party Massacre (2021 film), Wikipedia — cast, crew and release details