Pillow Party Massacre (2023)

One of the things I wish horror movies would stop doing is the meta-dialogue drop where a character proclaims “I feel like I’m in a horror movie!” to which someone replies “Well this isn’t a horror movie! This is real life.” Please stop that. I know I’m watching a horror movie. I don’t need to know that the characters know that we’re watching a horror movie. That said, “Pillow Party Massacre” is a mix of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and “Slaughter High” but with none of the fun hacking and slashing that goes with them. There’s nary a pillow party or a respectable massacre to be had.

Two years after a tragic April Fools prank, a group of friends returns to their childhood vacation home to reconnect and heal old wounds. As strange things begin to happen, and girls turn up missing, it’s clear that someone or something is out for revenge.

“Pillow Party Massacre” is a whodunit revenge slasher in the tradition of “Prom Night,” “Terror Train,” “Valentine,” and pretty much every other revenge slasher you can think of. If you’ve seen those, you’ve seen this– except “Pillow Party Massacre” leans very heavily in to drama, for some reason. The movie literally clocks in at almost ninety minutes and is stacked with filler. There’s a five minutes opening sequence, a ton of dialogue about how our characters feel so bad after brutally humiliating a class mate and getting another one murdered in cold blood. The group of miserable adults spend a lot of their times sitting in their vacation house smoking and griping about their lives, until the screenplay remembers we’re supposed to be watching a slasher movie.

You can call it an “80’s slasher throwback” all day long, but there’s nothing here that screams 80’s slasher, beyond the opening credits set to synth pop. It’s almost fifty minutes before the second kill in the narrative is staged, and by the time said “massacre” ensues, it feels too little, too late. Aside from that, Calvin Morie McCarthy’s film doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a dark drama about the fall out of school bullying, or is it an exploitation revenge slasher? Is the movie set in the late eighties or modern times? And why should we empathize with these awful people? To make things worse, every scene has almost zero color grading, so some scenes are this odd dull gray, while others are a yellow or blue tint. There’s also a lack of suspense or mystery behind the events that unfold, and by the time the killer began slashing through the characters, I was ready for it come to a merciful close.

Now available on various digital platforms.