First film of the Slumber Party Massacre series, isn’t to imaginative when it comes to creating story, but was a fun gory ride. As in many slasher flicks released shortly after the Friday The 13th/Halloween films. The story features a vengeful maniac escaping from the mental hospital, where after doing away with some selected victims here & there (a girl locked inside her school by accident & a pretty electrician) stalks the girls & their pretty neighbour, a new female classmate & the girls younger, bratty sister, not to mention a pizza delivery boy & the girls boyfriends who arrive unannounced to the party. His weapon of choice? a Drill & soon the maniac is boring holes into each one of them, while the remaining survivors attempt to stop the crazed maniac before they to wind up on his list of victims. SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE is a well directed & well acted (surprising considering the genre’s state at the time) slasher film that still works up a few chills & thrills, despite many bad imitators & it’s bad reputation it has received from parent groups & critics who label it as nothing more than sleaze, & violence against women. Such people obviously can’t accept the fact that we live in a naturally violent society & choose to pick on things that can’t answer back in order to try & hide what the really issues are. In English, what I am trying to say is, did these people who critically slam this film for the reason mentioned, the sleaze & violence committed against women, see the same movie I saw? THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE is violent, yes, it has the requisite nudity, true, but this film is no more violent & bloody, nor as sleazy, nor is it a film that glorifies violence against women then half of the films being marketed & put out today horror or other. Unlike a lot of slasher films released at the time, SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE is a lot more fresh & inventive. For starters, the film sort of does a sex switch take on the usual slasher spoon fed story telling, here it’s the girls who come to the rescue & save the day, not the men, the women here are smart, sassy, sophisticated & tough, with a lot of females used in roles usually given to men (telephone repair person, gym coach, carpenter etc.) while the men are the ones who make the stupid decisions & suffer far more violent deaths. That out of the way, as much & all as I love the film, I will say the film was padded at times, clocking in at 76 minutes, a lot of the film feels stretched out to far in areas, like how many times must we see the two sisters go out to the backyard to investigate a noise or sit around & talk to each other in the house? & how many trips to the garage must we be forced to sit through, as the girls from the slumber party are constantly making frequent trips out there? & I would have loved to have seen the killers earlier killing spree done in an epilogue before the real action begins, but I guess it just wasn’t in the budget. Horror fans looking for some cheap thrills should get a kick out of it. Highly influential, spawning countless rip-offs, THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY, BIKINI BLOODBATH series, SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE 1-3 etc. among others. All in all, in terms of 1980’s slasher films, SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE is still one of the best. Highly recommended to fans of the genre. Followed by two sequels starting with, SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE 2