PLOT: A group of young women spend the weekend playing music and partying with their boyfriends while one of them has visions of the Driller Killer, the maniac that terrorized her older sister and her friends years ago. 

I’m not quite sure what this movie even is. Full disclosure: before I watched this film, I was pretty sure that I had seen the original film. After watching it, I can’t be positive that I didn’t confuse this for The House on Sorority Row. Unless this film is like The Evil Dead 2 or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in comparison to their respective original films, I’m pretty sure I was mistaken. At the very least, I don’t remember there being a rockabilly killer with a guitar attached to an enormous drill in any movie that I’ve seen before. 

The film stars a pre-Wings Crystal Bernard as Courtney, the younger sister of the main girl, Valerie, from The Slumber Party Massacre. Courtney has experienced bad dreams since the incident, specifically about The Driller Killer. We meet Courtney as her and her friends decide to spend the weekend together, playing music in their New Wave band and partying with their boyfriends. Courtney’s dreams turn to visions and then reality as she gets haunted by The Driller Killer. 

I guess this is supposed to be a horror-comedy, and unfortunately, it just didn’t work for me. I fully accept that this could be partly due to the fact that I thought I was watching a sequel to an entirely different movie, but it’s also because the comedy just doesn’t work for me. And if it’s not supposed to be a comedy… yikes. The concept of The Driller Killer is far too silly to be anything scary, so it must be for laughs, but the rockabilly motif is just too dated to be anything relatable, even thirty years ago. 

 

OVERALL

Slumber Party Massacre II is… fine, I guess. In a decade filled with these sorts of films, you can easily find better versions of very similar stories. Hell, the first one is probably better. The girls are cute, if that means anything to you, and it’s kind of bloody, but it takes a long time to go from dreams and visions to legit danger, and there’s nothing that reduces my interest more than fake-outs. I didn’t hate it, but I might forget what I saw in about a week. 

OVERALL RATING: 5 out of 10