27th October 2018 | 31 Days of “Alternative” Horror: Tourist Trap
Some horrors are thrown in the rejection bin for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes comparisons can backfire. Tourist Trap came out at a time after the slasher movie genre was about to reach over-saturation. Where it missed on the theatrical run, it soon picked up its audience, as well as a cult following, on cable years later.
Tourist Trap works in much the same way as Texas Chainsaw Massacre in its setup, albeit for variations: Here, a groovy young couple are forced to stop their trek to “I’m not sure where” when their car gets a flat. The guy takes his flat tyre and happens on a place promising, “gas and eats”. There’s nobody inside it seems, but he goes in there anyway and soon happens upon a room filled with… well… killer inanimate objects moving by their own means, mannequins that appear setup to shock and scare as they are discovered, and eventually, the man is trapped and killed.
The waiting passenger is picked up by friends, in their VW Hummer, and together the group go to find him. They instead find a resort called SLAUSENS LOST OASIS. Perhaps their friend went there? Perhaps what we saw happen to their friend won’t be “just ahead” — excuse the pun.
Chuck Conners plays the sole “caretaker/manager” of the resort, Mr. Slausen, and it seems, he is merely there to keep the property safe. He certainly adds gravity to the movie which with just teenagers getting sliced and diced, could have fallen flat. Conners is known for being that charismatic larger than life character actor and whom after a career being the famed Rifleman, and sometimes the cowboy who shoots first and asks questions later, he found himself stuck in typecasting roles. As westerns declined in popularity in the 70s, Chuck still needed to fill the screen and decided to explore other genres. He appeared in movies like Tourist Trap most likely to subvert expectation and/or to extend his range, and it seemed, the horror genre was a huge deal at the time, and his being cast in it made this movie better.
On the surface, this is your run-of-the-mill predictable slasher, where you know these kids will be picked off, one by one, in creative and violent ways. But then you have to think about the levels.
· Watch for the final shot of the hummer and see how it compares to the earlier shot. The eeriness of the conclusion is very much a Chainsaw Massacre trope where the road to recovery passes through the realm of madness.
The lighting did fall flat on many of the internal shots, but then, wasn’t it a rundown resort that wasn’t meant to be well lit? For that part, fair enough, but when in the dark of a theatre where the medium is light, some creativity in light sources at time could have been a benefit for the expository scenes that didn’t need darkness to add to the suspense.
Technically this movie has some astounding qualities. You even forget that somebody had to set all these elaborate puppets, with rotated sets and reverse shooting, wirework and prosthetics. For these effects, for this time and for this budget, it was a time consuming element that paid off. By the end, you don’t forget the faces. They end up travelling with you…
Written by: Stephen Radford
website: stephenradford.com
Next: 28th October: Extinction
