Tourist Trap (1979)
Sep. 21st, 2020 11:05 pmMovie: Tourist Trap (1979), directed by David Schmoeller 
Tourist Trap begins, as some 37% of American ’70s-era horror flicks do, with five young and carefree friends on a road trip. A flat tire sends Woody off alone in search of assistance, and when he goes poking around in an abandoned gas station, mannequins start moving on their own, a bunch of stuff comes flying at him, and he gets impaled on a pipe. Meanwhile, the others are dealing with “mysterious” engine trouble, so the three women go skinny-dipping (well, DUH) while Jerry sort of stands around looking at his Jeep, searching real hard for a little switch he can flick from “broken” to “fixed.” Not to worry, though, because here comes help in the form of Mr. Slausen, the owner of “Slausen’s Lost Oasis,” chatting amiably with the nude women while casually brandishing a shotgun. Like ya do.
Ran: 7.17 miles, 8’52”/mile, 01:03:42 (recovery run)
Once again, it’s Maniac Monday! Which is still only kind of a thing, but I was in the mood to run to a classic, and this here classic features a maniac for the ages. Yes, tonight for the first time in years and years I rewatched Tourist Trap, and for my money, it still holds up as just as weird and creepy as I remember. Do dolls and mannequins skeeve you out? Then prepare to be well and truly skeeved.
Tourist Trap begins, as some 37% of American ’70s-era horror flicks do, with five young and carefree friends on a road trip. A flat tire sends Woody off alone in search of assistance, and when he goes poking around in an abandoned gas station, mannequins start moving on their own, a bunch of stuff comes flying at him, and he gets impaled on a pipe. Meanwhile, the others are dealing with “mysterious” engine trouble, so the three women go skinny-dipping (well, DUH) while Jerry sort of stands around looking at his Jeep, searching real hard for a little switch he can flick from “broken” to “fixed.” Not to worry, though, because here comes help in the form of Mr. Slausen, the owner of “Slausen’s Lost Oasis,” chatting amiably with the nude women while casually brandishing a shotgun. Like ya do.It just so happens that Mr. Slausen ran a roadside museum full of animatronic waxwork-style figures, but it closed when the highway moved and took his clientele with it. Everything still works, though! Maybe the girls should stay in the museum while Mr. Slausen takes Jerry to get the Jeep fixed. Oh, but don’t go into that house over yonder! (Eileen immediately goes to that house over yonder, where she is stalked and sort-of-strangled by a big guy in a creepy mask that we are to assume is Mr. Slausen’s brother Davey.) Becky soon goes looking for Eileen and finds her transformed into a mannequin, before she winds up tied up in the basement with Jerry watching Davey kill another girl. Then of course Molly has to go looking for Becky, etc. etc. you know the drill and eventually there’s a big shocking reveal that surprises literally no one, everything eventually spirals into the requisite third-act chase through the dark, and the quiet one turns out to be the ass-kicking Final Girl who lives crazily ever after.
So it’s sort of the standard late ’70s-early ’80s maniac serial killer sort of deal, but there are a couple of big departures from the formula. One is the addition of a telekinesis angle; Davey has the ability to move things with his mind, which he trots out to tease an escape by moving a dropped key just out of Jerry’s reach, but mostly he uses it to make mannequins roll their eyes and scream, rendering them even creepier than they already are. (“Room full o’ nightmares,” as Ghostbuster Patty succinctly puts it.) Apparently the telekinesis thing wasn’t in the original script and was suggested by a producer, presumably because someone decided that Michael Myers would have been way scarier if he had also been psychic, and that sharks are more awesome with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads. I mean, yeah? Whatever, it works here, just run with it.
But another difference is the relative infrequency and tameness of the onscreen gore. Would you believe Tourist Trap is rated PG? I mean, I understand that this was before the advent of PG-13, but still, it kinda makes you think. I personally consider the killing of basement-rando Tina to be among the scariest, most effective, and most gut-wrenching onscreen murders I’ve seen in a horror movie, and there’s no gore at all—just the killer slowly spreading plaster over her face, narrating the burning sensation it causes, slowly plugging all of her airways until she dies of fright before even has time to asphyxiate. That’s a scene that has stayed with me, boy howdy. And it’s not the only one: offhand I can say that both the scene revealing Jerry’s fate (I won’t spoil it, because it’s BAD-ASS) and the closing freeze-frame of the film revealing Molly’s final state rank high on my scare card, and neither of those involve any blood or gore either.
I should mention that it’s not a perfect movie—there’s an element of ’70s cheese and Chuck Connors was maybe not the ideal actor to portray Slausen. Also, full disclosure: I have a soft spot for creepy dolls and masks and mannequins and the like, which probably goes back to the ventriloquist’s doll I had at age 8 that would change positions while I slept, but I would hazard a guess that even if you didn’t have a similar traumatic childhood experience with a devil doll, you’ll find Tourist Trap to be a reasonably frightening little number. Also, the music is bananas, veering from ’70s soap opera melodrama to weird cartoony circus kinda stuff that’ll leave you just uneasy enough to really lose it when the Bad Things Happen™. Seriously, if you haven’t seen this utter classic, you owe it to yourself to check it out.
The plot of Suspiria is hardly the point, but here’s a quick rundown anyway: Suzy Bannion is a young American ballet dancer who has come to study at a prestigious dance school in Germany, and things are weird from the start. An expelled student and her friend are found brutally murdered. Suzy “mysteriously” faints and hemorrhages, and is confined to quarters on a “special diet” which makes her strangely sleepy each night. Maggots rain from the ceiling. The school’s blind pianist is killed by his faithful seeing eye dog. Suzy’s newfound friend vanishes when she gets too curious about what the school’s staff get up to after hours. In trying to track her down, Suzy learns that the academy was originally a school of the occult founded by a Greek witch who died in a fire. And now that Suzy knows more than she should, too, it’s not hard to guess what’s next on the agenda.
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