Tourist Trap

See my Friend! Molly!
One of the best horror films of the 1970's has finally been given a long overdue home video makeover. TOURIST TRAP is the most frightening movie ever made about mannequins, and a classic example that a low budget can be a horror film's greatest asset. In today's predictable, estrogen-driven MTV style of filmmaking wherein the writers believe that blood, gore, and throwaway lines are the ingredients necessary to make a horror film, TOURIST TRAP blows that notion out of the water. The film possesses an air of originality thanks to Nicholas Von Sternberg's beautiful visual style and superb editing by Ted Nicolaou. The story itself is similar to PSYCHO, but it's done with such pinache that one might not initially realize it. Brian DePalma's SISTERS (1973) is another great PSYCHO inspiration that you should check out if you already have not.

I first saw this movie one Saturday afternoon on TV in the mid-80's and it left one hell of an impression on me. It begins with what...

Get Caught in the TRAP!
THE TOURIST TRAP was mentioned by STEPHEN KING as one of his favorite movies. It was supposed to reinvent Chuck Connors as a Lon Chaney for the 1980s. It didn't do great at the box office, because ... well it was surrounded by other slasher flicks that were R-rated, and despite what it says on the box this only earned a PG. But it has endured to become a cult classic, largely due to the fact it was easily shown on television (don't have to cut much out!).

It's a creepy little story about a group of teens who get stranded on a lonely highway, and taken to a curious wax museum where they are picked off one by one in order of their sexual promiscuity. Sounds pretty typical for 80s horror, but this one has the killer having telekinetic powers so that objects fly, manequins scream, and mayhem breaks out. The climax is very different from its peer group! The last shot of the movie burns into your mind, and suddenly you realize ... TOURIST TRAP ain't a bad place to find some...

an effective rip-off
Like many reviewers have already stated here, "Tourist Trap" is the kind of movie you see as a little kid and have horrifying flashbacks of, even years later. It's a testament to this film's intense settings and mounting suspense that it's still regarded so highly today, because not much of it is original.

Director David Schmoeller, who got a tour-de-force performance out of Klaus Kinski in "Crawlspace," does the same with aging rifleman Chuck Connors. He plays Slausen, a lonely yet kind man who runs a curio shop in the middle of nowhere. A group of teens show up quickly enough with the requisite car trouble, and Slausen shows hospitality but can't warn them enough about staying away from a nearby farmhouse. In typically predictable fashion (once night rolls around, of course) the teens start to disappear and will--at one point or another--come face to face with "Davey," Slausen's alleged brother who turns his unfortunate victims into...

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