Toying lesbians slumber (photos)

Scripted by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown, THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE puts a smart, subversive, and lightly satirical spin on the 1980s slasher formula. When Trish (Michelle Michaels) decides to invite her high-school basketball teammates over for a slumber party, she has no idea the night is going to end with an unexpected guest crashing the party: an escaped mental patient toting a portable power drill. Toying playfully with genre conventions, director Amy Holden Jones offers all the requisite shocks, thrills, and gore, along with a provocative commentary on female psychosexual anxiety.

So, straight girls, before you start toying with sapphic hearts, remember lesbians are human beings with feelings and emotions (even if we try to act tough sometimes).

She wanted the door opened for her. She wanted to have slumber parties with a cool girl who also paid for her dinners. She was lonely, and lesbians make amazing, loyal, caring companions.

Her name is Trish, by the way, and her parents are going out of town this weekend. She wants to have some friends over, but no boys are allowed. Played by Michele Michaels (who like most horror movie teenagers, doesn’t look a day over 25) she’s first seen putting all her old stuffed animals and Barbie dolls in the trash, signaling to the audience – and her creepily over-attentive, trash-picking neighbor – that she’s on her way to becoming a woman. Trish has also got what’s pretty clearly a crush on Valerie (Robin Stille), the girl next door. But then, most of the female characters we encounter in The Slumber Party Massacre are unsubtly coded as lesbians, from the hottie hard-hat telephone line worker to our old standby, the girls’ gym teacher. When we meet the men in the movie, we begin to understand why.