An out-and-out feminist horror-comedy oddity that also delivers the groceries just fine when it comes to blood, scares, and naked girls. It’s the only slasher movie of its time written and directed by women. The screenplay is from novelist Rita Mae Brown, most famous for The Rubyfruit Jungle, the account of an unapologetic lesbian’s coming of age that plays a little like a queer Catcher in the Rye. In this film, she and director Amy Holden Jones offer up a rare cinematic world where young girls are just as likely to argue about sports as they are about boys, where women occupy blue collar jobs such as phone technician and carpenter, and where overprotective men inspire a roll of the eyes. It’s about a group of teenage girls who play for their high school basketball team (these ladies are full-on jocks who, as the film demonstrates more than once, can beat up most boys) and decide to have a slumber party as a last youthful fling before graduation. The only problem: A mad murderer just happened to escape from prison that same day and he’s got a long, hard power drill and a drive to increase his body count. Like Michael Myers in Halloween, he follows these girls around all day long and finally decides to say hello late that night when all of the adults are away, all senses are dulled, and all defenses are down.
The film’s symbolism ain’t subtle. Amy Holden Jones goes out of her way to frame the killer’s drill as an angry phallic symbol. And in one of the few scenes where the killer speaks, his bloodlust is portrayed as indistinguishable from a rapist’s zeal. Naturally, his defeat comes with a symbolic castration. It’s not the first slasher movie to take this stance and it’s not the last—the slasher genre has long had a feminist subtext, what with its frequent trope of a smart female hero who defeats a brutish male monster—but it’s one of the more memorable examples of it, due to its flashy awareness of its message and its sense of humor. About half the murders here are played for laughs (the body in the refrigerator, the nosy neighbor who gets killed while he’s out on his own killing spree exterminating snails in his garden with a knife) and the girls themselves are funny and likable.
It’s a natural cult classic. Look for Brinke Stevens in a small part early in the film. She cheerfully bares her ass (for the film’s great girl’s locker room shower scene) and then dies about five minutes later, but she went on to have the longest B-movie career out of anyone here and is still a sentimental favorite of many horror fans and filmmakers to this day.