4/10
Average by-the-numbers teen slasher.
27 August 2006
Warning: Spoilers
Slumber Party Massacre III starts on a beach where Jackie Cassidy (Keely Christian) tells her friends that her parents are away & that they should come over to her place & have a slumber party. Sarah (Devon Jenkin) is given the task of getting in the food but as she gets in her car she is brutally murdered... That night all the girls meet up, drink, laugh & strip in front of each other as three guys turn up. However someone else much more unwelcome decides to gatecrash the party, a brutal killer is at large & intends to slaughter them all before the night is over...

Directed by Sally Mattison (at least we now know a woman can make a horror film just as badly as any bloke) I thought Slumber Party Massacre III (although the version I watched had the title A Stab in the Dark) was a dull, predictable, unoriginal teen slasher that does nothing to try & distinguish itself in an already over populated & limited sub-genre. The script by Catherine Cyran is drawn out, it has the usual cardboard character's that could have come straight out of any other slasher film, it has no reasonable explanation behind the killers motives, it gives the killer identity away far too early & then it's just a boring precession until the end & to add insult to injury it has a fairly low body count. There is nothing in Slumber Party Massacre III that any horror fan wouldn't have already seen a 100 time before in just about any other slasher. The film takes itself far too seriously, it's incredibly dull & very slow at times.

Director Mattison doesn't do a thing to try & liven things up, it's very flatly shot, it's utterly forgettable & throughly dull. There's no atmosphere & I just kept thinking to myself simply leave the house, run away, go to a neighbour's, call someone but just do SOMETHING instead of just standing there waiting to be killed. There's a decent kill at the start where someone has a drill shoved through their body but apart from that there's not much gore here, there's a few more drill murders, someone is impaled on a 'For Sale' house sign & in the films best kill someone is taking a bath & the killer drops a vibrating dildo in the water to electrocute her, death by dildo! There's a bit of nudity & sex as well but it doesn't really help that much.

Slumber Party Massacre III is fairly well made, special effects are OK & it's quite well lit but it's all rather bland. The acting was poor throughout, don't give up your day jobs girls...

Slumber Party Massacre III is nothing to get excited about, frankly I was pretty bored & felt liked I'd seen it all before. Much worse than either the original The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) or it's sequel the rather impressive & fun Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) so watch one of those instead.
1 out of 7 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

Recently Viewed