Director – Danishka Esterhazy, Screenplay – Suzanne Kelly, Producers – Adam Friedlander, Samantha Levine & Tebogo Maila, Photography – Trevor Calverley, Music – Andries Smit, Visual Effects Supervisor – Rory Mark, Special Effects Supervisor – Andrew Robertson, Makeup Design – Amanda Ross-McDonald, Production Design – Bobby Cardoso. Production Company – Shout! Studios/Blue Ice Africa.
Cast
Hannah Gonera (Dana Devereaux), Mila Rayne (Alix), Frances Sholto-Douglas (Maeve), Alex McGregor (Breanie), Reze Tiana-Wessels (Ashley), Rob Van Vuuren (Russ Thorn), Jennifer Steyn (Kay Thorn), Schelaine Bennett (Trish Devereaux), Masali Baduza (Young Trish Devereaux), Michael Potter (John), Eden Classens (Matt), Nathan Castle (Sean), Richard Wright-Firth (Guy One), Arthur Falko (Chad), Jane De Wet (Jackie), Reem Koussa (Jackie), Larissa Crafford-Lazarus (Diane)
Plot
In 1993, Trish Devereaux is the sole survivor of an attack on a group of girls in a cabin at Holly Springs. She shoves the attacker Russ Thorn over the side of a jetty but his body is never found. In present-day Los Angeles, Trish’s daughter Dana and three girlfriends head off for a weekend together, being joined by Maeve’s younger sister Alex who has snuck in the back of the SUV. However, the vehicle breaks down and the girls are forced to accept lodgings at a cabin owned by the convenience store owner Kay. As they settle in, it becomes apparent that they know that the cabin is the one where Russ Thorn attacked and have come to lay a trap and kill him.
The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) was one of the numerous entries among the Slasher Film fad of the 1980s. Produced by legendary B movie producer Roger Corman, it was considered a feminist response to the slasher film due to the fact that it was directed and written by women. Whether this was the intent or not seemed immaterial to Corman who went on to produce three sequels, all of them directed by women, with Slumber Party Massacre II (1987), Slumber Party Massacre III (1990) and over a decade later Slumber Party Massacre IV/Cheerleader Massacre (2003).
The remake comes from Canadian director Danishka Esterhazy, who began making a series of fairytale deconstructions with the short films The Snow Queen (2005) and The Red Hood (2009), followed by the full-length Suddenly Ever After (2010) and H & G (2013). In genre material, Esterhazy also made the science-fiction film Level 16 (2018) and The Banana Splits (2019), which turned a children’s tv series into a horror movie featuring killer animatronics.
By the time of the remake, Roger Corman is no longer involved. However, the idea of a remake of The Slumber Party Massacre made for the Syfy Channel switches one off before you even start watching. On the other hand, within the first few minutes Danishka Esterhazy serves up a scene where Jane De Wet answers the door and abruptly gets a metre-long powerdrill through the head, which proves strong stuff to quickly wake you up.
Slumber party girls – (l to r) Hannah Gonera, Alex McGregor, Reze Tiana-Wessels and Frances Sholto-Douglas
The film is not so much a remake as another film that uses the same title and has a loosely similar plot set around girls holding a slumber party and being stalked by a maniac wielding a power drill. This shakes the formula up somewhat and makes the setting into an archetypical Cabin in the Woods, whereas the other Slumber Party Massacre films never left suburbia. One oddity is that despite being sat in California, the film was actually shot in South Africa and features a number of locals as cast.
All of the other Slumber Party Massacre films were slasher films made by women but Danishka Esterhazy takes the feminist angle further than all of the other films put together. It is very much a girl power slasher – the plot has the girls are no longer victims but have more proactively ventured out to the cabin to trap the killer. This time the killer gets a drill with a much more massive bit on it than the original killer ever did, while Danishka Esterhazy gives us all the shots of the killer standing with the drill between their legs like a crude phallic symbol. While the other Slumber Party Massacre films featured ready female toplessness, Esterhazy features a scene where the girls look in on the guys’ cabin as they engage in a shirtless slow-motion pillow fight. In another scene, Michael Potter is warned not to go out and responds with “Yeah, I know. But my toxic masculinity is kind of forcing me into it.”
Danishka Esterhazy satisfying delivers the gore effects that are expected of slasher films. There’s the abovementioned scene where Jane De Wet answers the door and another where Nathan Castle defends himself against the killer with the guitar only for the guitar string to get wound up in the drill bit and turn into a makeshift power saw that chews his head up.
There are also some cutely appealing callbacks to the other films – the aforementioned drill as phallic symbol, while the visit to the guy’s cabin has Nathan Castle strumming an ornate pink guitar, exactly the same one as the killer used in Slumber Party Massacre II. This also appropriates the name of Alanis Hitch’s guitar-wielding character from that film who was named The Driller Killer for the killer here.
