The 70s certainly knew how to hold it’s own when it came to the realms of weird-ass horror. Don Coscerelli’s gloriously trippy Phantasm effortlessly turned reality to mush while Dario Argento’s Suspiria somehow managed to take the beats of an actual nightmare and graft it onto celluloid with truly unnerving results. However, lurking just off the beaten track was David Schmoeller’s Tourist Trap, a truly bizarre entry into the genre that seemed to merge The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Carrie with an unhealthy obsession of creepy looking mannequins.
If Schmoller’s name seems vaguely familiar, it because he went on and gave producer Charles Band Puppet Master, another movie involving fucked up dolls of some kind, but where Band’s unkillable cash cow ultimately devolved into one of horror’s most bafflingly long running franchises, Tourist Trap remains a far more curious affair that revels in slowly going off the deep end from the moment it starts.
A band of quintessential horror youths are heading through the Californian desert for vague holiday reasons when they come across the rest of their group who are suffering from a flat tyre. While bucket hatted himbo, Woody, has gone off in search of a gas station to get the spare refilled with air, the others head on and eventually stumble upon Slausen’s Lost Oasis, a tourist trap that’s obviously seen better days, but as the gangs luck seems to running constantly bad, their second vehicle breaks down too.
Still, they certainly have it better than Woody, who after finding a gas station, is assaulted by a creepy fucking bunch of chuckling mannequins and is ultimately killed by a floating metal pipe, but blissfully ignorant of their friend’s murder, Jerry tries to fix their jeep while Molly, Becky and Eileen head to a local watering hole for an on-hand bout of skinny dipping.
It’s here that they meet Mr. Slausen himself, a seemingly unassuming old fella who still laments the death of his wife, the failure of his tourist attraction thanks to the new freeway and misses his absentee brother who apparently created all the mechanical dummies that litter the place. However, as kindly as Slausen is, there’s obviously something highly questionable going on here and as each one of the girls foolishly wander off into the night for predictably iffy reasons, they’re set upon by a masked assailant.
However, while this mannequin-faced creep seems to have a bad case of arrested development and a hankering to turn his victims into dummies themselves, he seems to have a massive advantage thanks to the rather random fact that he has telekinetic abilities that can give all those lifelike effigies seem even more alive.
There’s so many things about Tourist Trap that endeavor to be as incredibly fucking weird as humanly possible that picking the most strangest thing would be an exercise in futility. However, I have to admit, among the torrent of mocking dummies with flip-bin lid mouths and legitimately unnerving masks (I swear, one looks like the unholy merging of Jay Leno and Ronald Reagan), surely the most bizarre aspect is the fact that 70s censors somehow deemed this quirky little nightmare perfectly ok for a PG rating. While there’s admittedly little gore to be found in this atmospheric oddity aside from a surprisingly dry impaling, a telekinetic knife in the back of the head and some business with an axe, Schmoller keeps the focus on bringing the strange vibes coming over overt splatter. It’s probably the reason that the film has a small but devoted cult following as many young viewers were doubtlessly snared by the soft rating only to find themselves assaulted by endless, trippy, nightmare fuel.
To be honest, I missed this movie during my formative years and thus Tourist Trap didn’t really do the number on me that it may have if I was still a pre-teen, but even watching it now, you have to marvel at how casually batshit it truly is. Nothing is truly explained and so you just have to accept that the villain can just move shit with his mind, however, if you just go with it, the film’s stubbon stance of simply not giving a fuck about following standard rule manages to win you over.
There’s issues, of course. Even for 1979, the premise of a band of kids rocking up to a random establishment only to endure murder, insanity and the missed opportunity to slag the place off on TripAdvisor, was already horribly unoriginal and the slack jawed cadre of young people are no different than the acres of dead teens that was soon to kittner the landscape as the 80s took off – however, because the plot is so unhinged, it’s probably a blessing that the leads are all so impressively bland. Never fear though, because balancing out those insipid teens is weathered character actor Chuck Connors, who utterly goes for broke while portraying the seemingly sedate Mr. Slausen.
To tip things firmly into spoiler territory, it turns out that the wistful old dude seems to have something of a multiple personality syndrome and when the time comes to unleash his insanity, he pops on one of a series of equally freakish masks, adopts a ludicrously low voice and uses his mental powers to make the many mannequins dance, sigh, chuckle and sing and it proves to be an genuinely unnerving experience.
Adding to this, Schmoller admirably chooses to keep things completely unpredictable and even ten minutes from the end, you’re not entirely sure how things are going to work out.
Probably the best thing I found when watching Tourist Trap, is that the whole enterprise has the exact same feel as reading one of those crazed, pulpy, horror paperbacks from the 70s and 80s that you’ve managed to find in a musty old bookshop that hurls the usual conventions into the nearest creek.
While it doesn’t manage to reach the heights of some of the other, more famous examples of 70s horror, Tourist Trap contains enough freakish visuals, outlandish plot twists and haunting happenstances to fill a dozen fever dreams – oh, and that final shot? Pure fucking bananas.
I would say that after watching this film, you’ll never look at a mannequin quite the same way again – but as the plastic-faced bastards are plenty eerie to begin with, Schmoller does well to make them even worse.
In a world full of giant balls of twine and ostrich farms, this is one Tourist Trap that’s actually worth a visit.
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