a review of 睡衣晚会大屠杀2

HOOPTOBER, NIGHT TWENTY-TWO: This one felt like a pretty big comedown from the first Slumber Party Massacre, which derived its greatness from the fact that it looked all for the world like a sleazy T&A-filled zero-effort slasher movie, until you started to pick apart its images and narrative and realized how it was subverting the form. It did this by demystifying its own antagonist and emphasizing how victims (specifically women targeted by evil men) could successfully band together and fight back against threats to themselves and each other. On the other hand, the sequel spends most of its running time treating its killer (played by Little Caesar's pizza heir Atanas Ilitch, go look it up) as a total figment of the main character's imagination. With his drill/guitar/phallus weapon, he's a fairly obvious Freudian symbol of her sexual fear and desire, and for a while it seems like the movie might have a somewhat less sensationalistic view on the subject than most teen horror. Then in the last 20 minutes, suddenly the movie turns him into a mystical singing/dancing/wisecracking slasher who lustily drills his way through the entire cast before an ending that seems to come down hard on the "sex is scary and very bad" side of the argument. Somehow the movie manages to both trivialize the main character's reticence towards sex, while also turning the symbolic male rapist of the first movie into a silly/sexy Elvis impersonator, and it just feels like a missed opportunity.