{"id":39793,"date":"2023-05-17T10:53:34","date_gmt":"2023-05-17T14:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=39793"},"modified":"2023-05-17T16:34:11","modified_gmt":"2023-05-17T20:34:11","slug":"pillow-party-massacre-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/17\/pillow-party-massacre-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Pillow Party Massacre (2023)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>One of the things I wish horror movies would stop<\/strong><\/em> doing is the meta-dialogue drop where a character proclaims \u201cI feel like I\u2019m in a horror movie!\u201d to which someone replies \u201cWell this isn\u2019t a horror movie! This is real life.\u201d Please stop that. I know I\u2019m watching a horror movie. I don\u2019t need to know that the characters know that we\u2019re watching a horror movie. That said, \u201cPillow Party Massacre\u201d is a mix of \u201cI Know What You Did Last Summer<\/a>\u201d and \u201cSlaughter High\u201d but with none of the fun hacking and slashing that goes with them. There\u2019s nary a pillow party or a respectable massacre to be had.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cPillow Party Massacre\u201d is a whodunit revenge slasher in the tradition of \u201cProm Night,\u201d \u201cTerror Train,\u201d \u201cValentine<\/a>,\u201d and pretty much every other revenge slasher you can think of. If you\u2019ve seen those, you\u2019ve seen this– except \u201cPillow Party Massacre\u201d leans very heavily in to drama, for some reason. The movie literally clocks in at almost ninety minutes and is stacked with filler. There\u2019s 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\u2019re supposed to be watching a slasher movie.<\/p>\n

You can call it an \u201c80\u2019s slasher throwback\u201d all day long, but there\u2019s nothing here that screams 80\u2019s slasher, beyond the opening credits set to synth pop. It\u2019s almost fifty minutes before the second kill in the narrative is staged, and by the time said \u201cmassacre\u201d ensues, it feels too little, too late. Aside from that, Calvin Morie McCarthy\u2019s film doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Now available on various digital platforms.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the things I wish horror movies would stop doing is the meta-dialogue drop where a character proclaims \u201cI feel like I\u2019m in a horror movie!\u201d to which someone replies \u201cWell this isn\u2019t a horror movie! This is real life.\u201d Please stop that. I know I\u2019m watching a horror movie. I don\u2019t need to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[240,302,477,501,703,840,950,1186],"class_list":["post-39793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-crime","tag-drama","tag-horror","tag-indie-film","tag-mystery","tag-revenge","tag-slasher","tag-whodunit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39793"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39796,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39793\/revisions\/39796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}