MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*
While PARTY #2 isn't a huge improvement over the first film, I have to give it points for being a little less predictable.
Writer-director Deborah Block doesn't have a much more stellar resume on IMDB than does previous writer-director Amy Jones. However, Block's PARTY has much more of the look and feel of a slasher-movie. True, she does so by having her viewpoint character besieged by nightmare visions long before encounters the required massacre-maker who may have been partly patterned on Freddy Kruger. (PARTY #1 made substantial coin in 1982, so it's not evident why the producers took five years to whip out a sequel.)
A year or two has passed since the first film. Courtney Bates, the junior high girl who was already very curious about sex, wasn't deeply involved in the original rampage of maniacal Russ Thorn, but we don't know what happened to Trish while Courtney's sister Valerie has been confined to an asylum. Courtney (now played by Crystal Bernard, the only PARTY #2 performer who went on to any acting fame) is first seen slowly awakening from sleep in her bed at home, swaddled in pink sheets. Given that PARTY #2 is mostly about Courtney's desire to overcome past demons and to live a normal (and therefore sexually fulfilling) life, I suspect that the pink sheets were a conscious choice on Block's part.
Courtney hasn't dated yet, but she's in an all-female rock band with three other girls. None of the other characters are important to the story except as background, with the minor exception of Matt, a classmate Courtney likes. Courtney's birthday is impending, and on the same weekend she's been invited by one of her band-buddies to a weekend, just for the girls at a beach condo. The young woman's mother tries to talk Courtney into going to visit her institutionalized sister instead. Courtney, her mind filled with thoughts of sex (since a few boys, including Matt, have been invited), avoids associating with her sister's trauma and gets permission to make the trip (which I don't recall being called a slumber party).
Once she's on her way to the condo, though, our heroine begins having all sorts of minatory nightmares, while at the condo she begins to conflate her potential boyfriend with a weird specter that looks like a demonic Elvis. Most of Courtney's "waking dreams" are fairly standard grossout illusions, but the pomaded predator in the black leather, billed as The Driller Killer, is a fairly original creation. Once Block has burned up a certain amount of time with the bad dreams, she gets down to business with a high-octane chase scene. The Driller, who wields a guitar with a rotary drill mounted on its neck, comes to life and begins slaughtering teens right and left, with copious Freddy-like lines about sexual stimulation (quoting the Stones "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," for example). All of Courtney's friends die, but once her back is against the wall, she summons her inner Final Girl and destroys the killer with a Molotov cocktail. (I assume he doesn't sing "Hunka Burning Love" as he dies was because the rights cost too much.) Or is the Driller Killer dead? The movie ends with the teen bedded down in an asylum like her sister, just as that fearsome penile drill starts burrowing in from beneath.
Nothing in the finished script indicates a connection between the Driller Killer and deceased maniac Russ Thorn, but some online sites claim that the specter is "The Reincarnated Russ Thorn." I didn't credit this theory at first. However, I was initially perplexed as to why Courtney, a teen who would have been born in the early seventies, would have imagined some greasy-haired rockabilly type as the incarnation of destructive sexuality. HOWEVER-- earlier I pointed out that the performer playing Russ Thorn in PARTY #1 was in his forties when that film was made. So if Thorn came back as a super-powered ghost a la Freddy-- then in life he would have been a teen in the 1950s, and HE would have regarded a greasy rocker as the epitome of dangerous male sexuality. Courtney could not have known that, but if she'd failed to exorcise her psychological trauma, maybe she opened a gateway for Thorn's return. But if so, Psycho Elvis got no third act, for PARTY #3 dropped any connections to the other two films.
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