Sleepwalk (Sara Driver, 1986) vs The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden Jones, 1982)
Female directors, female screenwriters, female protagonists!
Sleepwalk (Sara Driver, 1986)
"not until the year of the dog, can these tales be told... only one chosen person can unravel the knot, only one among these many stories fits the prophecy... mortals, do not question the will of the immortals in the year of the dog…"A Japanese woman in a red dress opens a wall cabinet, taking out a page of the manuscript and rolling it up. After she leaves, a tall man comes in - his shadow on the wall as he slides open the door tells us this is quite possibly dubious - opens the cabinet, takes out the manuscript, and takes the next page.
Working in a printing shop (at one of the tables is Steve Buscemi), typing away at the computer terminal with aching wrists, Nicole is visited by two mysterious strangers (one of them the tall man!) who want her to translate some Chinese text. Since it's not part of her day job, she can only do it by staying back after work.
Ripped from a VHS copy, it seems appropriate to watch this film with all the characteristics of video tape playback intact, bringing back memories of obscure movies taped off the TV at 3am. Images and borders bleed ever-so-slightly into each other, as if the images need a proper format to convey the interstitial world our hero, Nicole, enters. Shot in an eerily deserted, slightly anomic NY City, the film itself is a dreamscape, of fairy tales subtly changing the day-to-day existence of our protagonist. Is what we see real, or part of her own mind? A product of hallucination from the job she takes on (occupational health and safety issues!)? Or myth and fable seeping through drab reality?
Story becomes less and less important, sort of, as mood, symbolism and a dreamlike logic take hold. The fairy tales start to impinge in weird ways on the life of Nicole. A cut finger, a barking businessman, hair falling out, the smell of almonds (or perhaps poison), a black dog, an elevator ride where every stop is a Lynchian moment. The cinematography captures strongly thrown shadows and light with a palette of dull blues and greys, and the occasional Oriental red. Her husband Jim Jarmusch might have been on camera, but it comes off as quite distinct from his own visions.
As a whole, the film starts out fine, if a little 80s NY avant-art-scenish, but there is a rhythm and finely attuned storytelling verve that takes hold. The effrontery of the imagery - part pure-cinema, part surrealist, part performance art - starts to mesh itself into the story and the characters, and the anxious need to make sense of it all in a classic narrative sense just fades away. It becomes a journey taken where the things that are just have to be accepted. I like that.
The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden Jones, 1982)
He's dead all right. He's so cold.
Is the pizza?Written by prominent feminist writer Rita Mae Brown, and directed by Corman alum Amy Holden Jones, you'd expect this film to go straight for the throat of the conventions of the slasher film, and in some ways it certainly does, but in other ways it disappointingly does not.
The narrative is pure, undistilled slasher territory. We have a psycho on the loose (with a heavily phalllic killer monster-drill), we have the parents away, undressy senior schoolgirls preparing for a slumber party (
like the good old days), and boys who seem to be stuck in a juvenile sexual development phase, and various secondary characters who could very well come over to check on the girls at any time. Perfect set-up opportunities for many, many false scares.
There is an ease in portraying the women in this film. Apart from the various handywomen we see - a female phone worker, a friend drilling a hole in the front door for a new peephole - nudity is there, but it's quite desexualised. As the girls shower there are boobs and bottoms aplenty (plus classic female locker room banter,
"You know what, I think your tits are getting bigger!"), but the camera has this serene, gliding quality, ending up with a long take on a girl's back and bottom that seems almost reverential.
The women are also given onscreen space to reflect - without dialogue, just thinking - whilst engaging in domestic duties with a maturity that belies their years. All very odd. Mind you, there are the usual pratfalls of talking about boys, listening in on phone conversations and whatnot, it's just that the usual voyeuristic egregiousness of the camera seems to be a little off.
Then there's the phallus. An instrument of penetration. The killer stands above a cowering girl, and the camera shoots from behind his spread legs, the drill-bit hanging down between them, about to do its business. Male sexuality running rampant, sure, but the film is as much about female apprehension regarding sex, and especially the phallus. This slumber party just isn't like the good old days, as relationships and men have entered the picture.
Contrast the women with the peeping tom boys who manage to find themselves inside with the girls as the killer strikes. Given a knife by the uber-female, the boy looks at it and says
"Now I wish I hadn't dropped out of Cub Scouts… maybe I would have learned what to do with it." Poor immature sucker gets dealt with in the appropriate manner.
I liked this emphasis. The idea of the phallus and of penetration is given this sly, comic touch. When the opportunity to strike back arises, the girls have this hesitation with using the knives, be it from common courtesy or from an aversion to penetrative violence (I'm going with the latter, naturally), but they grit their teeth and get on with the stabbing and the chopping. It's all about becoming a real woman, I guess.
Eh, but I probably go too far. It's a slyly funny film, but the genuine scares are few and far between. Subtextual bullsh*t hypotheses aside, it comes off as a relatively straight slasher picture, with some quite level-headed and equitable female characters. Well worth watching, in the end.
*************
So,
Sleepwalk will move ahead in this round. It's a delicate little film, and will need some tender watching-care from the next viewer, but it deserves to be seen by more people.