After an April Fools prank goes wrong, the prankee gets revenge by shooting the prankster. Two years later, the friend group who witnessed and/or were involved with the prank hold a reunion and decide to party it up. Predictably, a killer shows up to poop in the punch bowl. (Well, not literally.)
Pillow Party Massacre has a snazzy ‘80s vibe and is packed with cool music and strong performances. It also contains several scenes where the characters have honest, heartfelt, and dare I say, moving conversations about loss, guilt, and grief. Look, this is definitely not something that’s necessary in a picture called Pillow Party Massacre, but I’m happy to know it’s here, especially when it’s played so nicely by actresses Laura Welsh, Chynna Rae Shurts, Allegra Sweeney, and Jax Kellington. Heck, even the horror movie staple “Truth or Dare” scene plays more like a therapy session between the friends as they ask “Truth” questions that are more of the “checking in on your friends” variety than the typical “tell me something dirty” dialogue you’d normally hear in something like this.
Eventually, things erupt into a heated argument between the girls, and when all their pent-up feelings come out, they finally settle things with an all-out pillow fight. Director Calvin Morie (An Amityville Poltergeist) McCarthy sure knows how to shoot one of these things. He gives us lots of slow-motion shots of feathers floating in the air, plenty of close-ups of hot co-eds giggling, and gratuitous shots of girls ripping their tops off. In short… Cinema.
McCarthy doesn’t rest on his laurels when it comes to the gore. He delivers a knife through the back of the skull and out the eyeball, a geyser-riffic throat slashing, a hand hacking, a scene where a guy is cut in half LENGTHWISE, head smashing via pillowcase full of rocks, face burning, and one gal gets impaled to a tree. The biggest takeaway here is that McCarthy shows us you can make a gory ‘80s style slasher with characters that are three-dimensional and that you genuinely care about while still delivering on the demands of the genre (AKA: T & A and blood and guts).
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