Movie Review: Tourist Trap (1979)
Tourist Trap is an incredibly unique movie that’s remained polarizing to this day. Initially not at all successful upon its release, the film was showed a lot on TV throughout the ’80s due to its surprising PG rating, leading it to get a bit of a cult fanbase. Plenty of people praise the movie’s weirdness as an early slasher movie, yet many still find it utterly ridiculous and silly.
It’s the directorial debut of David Schmoeller (Puppet Master), who co-wrote the script with the intention of John Carpenter directing. Having just blown up with the runaway success of his independent film Halloween the year before, Carpenter was naturally too expensive, so Schmoeller directed it himself.
The movie starts with two separate groups of young people traveling along rundown roads. There’s Woody (Keith McDermott) and Eileen (Robin Sherwood, Death Wish II), and in the other group, Becky (Tanya Roberts, A View to a Kill), Jerry (Jon Van Ness), and Molly (Jocelyn Jones).
Woody’s car gets a flat tire, and he wanders off to a gas station that appears abandoned. He gets trapped inside and a bunch of mannequins appear, with one laughing maniacally at him. He then gets a bunch of objects launched at him, eventually getting impaled by a pipe. As an opening kill, this scene goes on for way too long, and I think it would have been wise for Schmoeller to show less. Even if he felt he had to show the mannequin, there were still about a dozen objects launched at Woody that missed, before the pipe finally connected. It’s a drawn out scene that loses whatever suspense it may have had.
The laughing mannequin itself is perhaps one part scary and two parts silly.
The others find some kind of tourist trap museum thing, and assume Woody is there. So they drive there in Jerry’s car, and the car of course breaks down. The three women wander off to a waterfall, and decide to go skinnydipping. There, they meet Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors, TV’s The Rifleman), a real folksy and polite but Norman Bates-seeming character, talking about how his tourist trap used to be successful before they put in the new freeway.
Mr. Slausen says he’ll help them, and they all go back to his place to get tools. They stop by Slausen’s Lost Oasis, something of a wax museum. He shows off some of his animated figures. The women stay behind as Slausen and Jerry go to the car.
Eileen wanders off, looking for Woody in the nearby house. She finds a bunch of creepy wax figures, and one calls her name. A stranger emerges wearing a mask, and a bunch of things start moving, and she’s strangled telekinetically with her own scarf.
Slausen goes back to Molly and Becky, and tells them that Jerry drove off into town. He discovers that Eileen had wandered off, which upsets him. He leaves to go look for her, and finds that she’d been turned into a mannequin. He returns to tell the women he didn’t find anything, and he leaves to continue his search. The two remaining women sneak off, Becky breaking into the house.
Becky finds a bunch of mannequins, and slowly grows more and more scared. The stranger in the mask comes up behind her, and she hears her name called from another room. She enters that room to be scared by an animated Eileen mannequin. She’s then tackled to the ground, and the door closes and locks on its own. She fights back, knocking the stranger out with a severed mannequin hand. The mannequins all then fall on her and pin her to the ground.
Unconscious, she’s brought down to a basement, where Jerry is tied and confined, as well as a new character, Tina (Dawn Jeffory), who is strapped to a table. She comes to, and Jerry tells her that the man in the mask if Slausen’s crazy brother, who had been mentioned once or twice earlier in the movie.
We see the stranger applying makeup to his mask. He comes back down to the basement with some drinks, just to taunt his three prisoners, it seems at first. He speaks in a creepy voice, and starts spreading plaster all over Tina’s face, covering her mouth and eyes. He eventually suffocates her by covering her nose. Well, I guess, she has a heart attack. While he does this, he’s explaining what he’s doing to her, and he says she won’t suffocate — instead that her heart will burst before she passes out.
Jerry frees himself and attacks the killer, but is subdued, and ultimately lifted off the air, choking. After a brief interlude with Molly at the museum, we cut back to the basement, where Jerry is now chained instead of tied.
The killer explains that Slausen makes him wear the mask because he’s better looking than him, and that his wife would get jealous, which is odd, considering Slausen talked about his wife being dead. He says that since the new highway opened up, he’s had to go out and find his victims, and also that Slausen has no idea that he does this. Jerry is able to pull the key toward him with his foot, and when he goes to grab it with his hand, it slowly moves away from him.
Molly finally goes outside to look for her friends. She’s immediately pursued by the masked killer, colding the face mold of one of his victims (I guess Woody). I liked him better when he didn’t talk; he was creepier then. He throws the face at her, and it moves on its own, opening its mouth.
She runs into the woods, and finds Mr. Slausen, who picks her up in his truck. They drive, and when Molly explains what’s going on, Slausen realizes it’s his brother.
Before going inside to turn on the radio to lure his brother, Slausen gives his gun to Molly, who waits outside. The masked killer comes at Molly, and she shoots, but in a twist, the gun was loaded with blanks. She then hits him in the face with the gun, and the mask breaks, revealing what anybody could have guessed: that the killer is Mr. Slausen. He is able to sneak up on her and capture her after she runs off.
In a mostly silly scene, Slausen sits down with his mannequin and talks to it, trying to get it to eat. He then puts the mask on and it is able to respond to him. He feeds it, and it talks to him.
We see that Molly is now restrained to a bed, begging Slausen for her escape. Back in the basement, Jerry is able to free himself and Becky. They run through the house, now littered with mannequins. Slausen, who had been playing with dolls, thinks he saw something, and asks one of the mannequins. He then wanders off to look for them. Becky and Jerry blend in with the other mannequins to escape detection, and they get separated once Slausen goes back to his dolls. Now detected, Jerry jumps through a window and runs off. Becky sneaks out a different window, and runs into the woods in the opposite direction.
Knowing that his cover hasn’t been blown to these two, Slausen appears as himself, and takes Becky inside to help her with her injuries. Her name gets called by the mannequins, and she gets up off the bed and finds a Woody mannequin, which causes Slausen to laugh. The animated mannequins all start shooting at her, and she takes cover. A Native American chief mannequin throws a knife into the back of her head.
Slausen goes back to Molly, and takes his mask off. He tells her she’s special because she reminds him of his dead wife. He then puts the mask of his wife on her and starts kissing it, which is really disturbing. He then admits that he killed his wife and his brother because they were having an affair.
Jerry shows up to save Molly, but it’s revealed when Slausen pulls off his arm and head that he was unwittingly turned into a mannequin. It’s a neat moment that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Slausen then dances with the mannequin of his wife, which has become animated. She picks up an axe and kills Slausen with it.
In the final seconds of the movie, we see her driving Jerry’s Jeep away with the mannequin figures of her friends.
It’s a silly movie, but it’s also definitely an interesting one. It’s a rare early slasher movie that doesn’t appear to be ripping off Halloween in any way. Instead, its immediate influences are very obviously Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and also Carrie with the telekinesis, which seems like it doesn’t really fit here, but whatever.
It goes more for shock than suspense, which makes the movie not all that great if you don’t find it scary (which I don’t). I’m sure some people will find the mannequins pretty scary, but I found them more sillly.
It has some redeeming qualities, of course. Chuck Connors is quite entertaining, and the score by Pino Donaggio (Don’t Look Now, Carrie) is quite effective.
Rating: 4/10
