TOURIST TRAP

A group of young adults decide to go on a road trip together. Almost immediately, one of them, Woody (Keith McDermott), suffers a blowout and goes looking for assistance. Alas, all he finds is a seemingly abandoned petrol station populated by eerie-looking dolls. Woody never returns to his friends …

Speaking of which, the group in question – Jerry (Jon Van Ness), Eileen (Robin Sherwood), the beautiful Becky (Tanya Roberts) and puritanical blonde Molly (Jocelyn Jones) – decide to go in search of errant Woody … eventually happening upon a disused wax museum, Slausen’s Lost Oasis. Good job really, as they run out of fuel at this point.

Believing the place to be deserted, the three girls go skinny-dipping in the idyllic lake behind the museum. That’s where they first meet Slausen (Chuck Connors), the museum’s owner.

He invites the group back to his place, introducing them to his uncannily lifelike wax creations and telling them of how he had to shut the business down when his wife’s death from cancer coincided with the government taking his land to build a highway over it. Now he lives with only memories and mannequins for company.

So, he’s happy to let the kids stay while they wait to get fuel for their car. His one stipulation is that they don’t snoop around. For their own safety. You know the drill.

Of course, it’s no time at all before one of the group does just that. And, er, becomes the subject of a scary set-piece as a consequence.

What happens next? Get watching! If you’ve missed this film in the past, you’re in for a treat.

An under-valued horror film from 1979, TOURIST TRAP was released in the wake of HALLOWEEN’s runaway success and subsequently got all-but-lost amid the glut of increasingly gory stalk’n’slash flicks that dogged the genre throughout the next couple of years.

In truth the film, while ostensibly tossing out the then-familiar pitch of a bunch of teens getting picked off one-by-one by a psycho with obscured motivation, is anything but a slasher picture.

Its most obvious forefather on paper would have to be HOUSE OF WAX and its many derivatives seen between its 50s release and the late 1970s. But once you view TOURIST TRAP, it makes much more sense to appropriate it with Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (its unconventional, disturbingly sympathetic monster; the twisted take on the traditional American family; the backwoods setting; the favouring of hysteria over gore). Bizarrely, TRAP also brings to mind Hooper’s FUNHOUSE – which, of course, it predates by a good couple of years. It’s impossible not to give a nod to DERANGED either, especially during some crucial latter-half scenes. And that alone, in my mind, is mighty praise indeed.

Pino Donaggio’s score is at times light and playful, at others boisterous and melodramatic. It’s at its best though when it’s somewhere between the two, echoing ALICE SWEET ALICE’s score with its haunting female vocal melodies.

The film’s greatest strength is its intelligent production design. Despite a readily apparent low budget, an atmosphere of almost constant creepiness is achieved. The mannequins are convincingly scary, Slausen’s surreal living arrangements unnerve from the moment we first see them (the dummy recreations of families sitting in everyday situations is marvellously scary), and each set-piece is beautifully constructed to evoke subtle chills before culminating in jangling thrills. Who cares that nary a drop of blood is spilt? It’s testament to the efficiency of David Schmoeller’s taut direction that the film doesn’t need it to reach such feverous pitches of demented terror.

A product of its time, you can rest assured the film plays into certain genre conventions: city folks’ fear of their rural cousins; teenagers who look at least 23 years old; laughably smooth music to signify any romantic interest; overplayed villains; dumb twist endings; the goody-goody girl who’s guaranteed to make it to the end.

But, overall, TOURIST TRAP is a superior genre entry originally released when virtually every other horror film coming out was either a piece of shit Italian knock-off or nondescript American slasher opportunist. Don’t get me wrong, I’m into them too: but when a film strives to achieve something more and buck trends of its time, I can’t help but love it all the more.

And who can fail to fall for a tale about a telekinetic model-maker that ends with such a fantastically ambiguous final frame?

88 Films bring TOURIST TRAP to UK DVD uncut and, for a fledgling distributor; they’ve made a cracking job of doing so.

Despite the odd speck here and there, TOURIST TRAP is largely clean and extremely well-rendered in this 1.85:1 transfer. The original aspect ratio is not only honoured, but also enhanced for 16x9 television sets. Blacks are strong and solid, colours comes across as bold yet natural, while detail is crisp and fine without ever suffering from undue enhancement.

Likewise, the English mono audio track proffered is a most welcome proposition throughout.

The disc opens to a noisy animated main menu page. From there, a static scene-selection menu allows access to the film via 24 chapters.

Of the nice set of bonus features on offer, the feature-length director’s commentary is doubtlessly the most comprehensive. The highlight of which are the filmmaker’s comments on Connors, the wonderful character actor who had hopes of ending his illustrious career as a modern-day Boris Karloff. It didn’t quite work out that way for the great man, bless him, but that was through no fault of his excellent turn in TRAP.

Schmoeller also turns up for a window-boxed, 7-minute interview which has been well-produced and edited. In it, he covers some of the same ground from the commentary track, albeit much more succinctly: the immediate realisation that Roberts was going to be a star (well, she went on to appear in A VIEW TO A KILL and become a regular in "That 70s Show" … if that’s ‘stardom’? Most SGM readers will no doubt remember her most fondly from 1975’s FORCED ENTRY – no, not the Shaun Costello roughie, the other one!), how the film’s box office was killed when the MPAA gave it a PG rating, Stephen King’s public affection for the movie, and more.

The film’s original theatrical trailer is in good health, if not quite as fit-looking as the main feature. It runs for 2 minutes and accurately conveys TOURIST TRAP’s excellent mix of style, scares and hysterics.

Finally we get a generous trailer gallery of other titles in the 88 Films roster: SORORITY BABES, EVIL BONG 2: KING BONG, PUPPET MASTER, CASTLE FREAK, GINGERDEAD MAN 2, KILLER EYE, THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, SKULL HEADS, MERIDIAN and CANNIBAL WOMEN IN THE AVOCADO JUNGLE OF DEATH.

TOURIST TRAP is a great little film and I sincerely hope this excellent DVD release introduces it to the recognition it’s entitled to. Well done, 88 Films – highly recommended!

Review by Stuart Willis