Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard) was the survivor of a slumber party massacre five years ago, and has been struggling to come to terms with her experience ever since, which has manifested itself in terrifying nightmares she has trouble admitting to anyone else that she suffers. Now she is seventeen and spends her spare time in an all-girl rock band with her schoolfriends, but even so the boy she likes, Matt Arbicost (Patrick Lowe), and would prefer to be dreaming about keeps getting kicked out of her reveries by a mysterious figure she calls the Driller Killer. This apparition is part memory of the murderer she survived, who used a large drill to slaughter his victims, and part of her concerns about the band, because Mr D.K. wields an elaborate guitar...
One which has a drill bit at the end, a big one too, which made him one of the weirder slasher movie villains from a decade that didn't exactly have a paucity of them. Although this was meant to be the sequel to the exploitation hit The Slumber Party Massacre, neither it nor the sequel to the sequel featured the same bad guy, so a recurring character for fans to latch onto was lacking. That said, Driller Killer here was perhaps more than enough for one movie considering his absurd, rock 'n' roll gimmickry, dressed up like Elvis Presley in the '68 Comeback Special, quiff and all, and making the most of his peculiar weapon as he flitted in and out of reality. For the first half we are unsure whether Courtney is simply inventing this man of her nightmares thanks to her trauma.
As with the first and third entries, producer Roger Corman hired a woman to direct, apparently so he could subvert the popular notion that slashers were hopelessly sexist, that in spite of them regularly featuring more female characters for the audience to identify with and sympathise with than practically any other genre aside from romance. He certainly got his money's worth from placing Deborah Brock at the helm here, for she wrote the script to ensure her lead characters has a particularly feminine set of worries aside from the more usual horror conventions protagonists suffer that they may be losing their minds. In this case, Courtney is troubled by finding a partner, by the sex they will inevitably have, keeping her friends as her behaviour turns erratic, and so on.
There was even a heavy flow of, er, menstrual concerns as her hallucinations (or are they?) take the form of her paralysing shame at finding blood in embarrassing places, such as when she sits down to eat or in bed where her friends will see when they invite her to a holiday home for a weekend so they can plan their music career. Oh, and party, not that the two are exclusive to one another, so you know that means eighties montage time with the four young ladies jumping about to the sounds of, say, Rock 'n' Roll High School they happen to stumble across while channel surfing, yup, there's nothing like the sound of the Ramones to get the fun started - and that's nothing like the sound of the Ramones, who would presumably be withholding the rights to their tunes so we get something else instead.
This was practically a musical as melodies and music-making featured strongly, not least because the murderer is a bizarre parody of a rockabilly singer, played by Atanas Ilitch with quite some aplomb, leaving you wishing he had found a different franchise to be a regular in (his more natural home being the stage). He even gets to sing while stalking Courtney and her friends as all Hell breaks loose in the latter stages, Brock unable to hold back any longer and defying reason to bring the Driller Killer out of the fantasy realm and into the real world, or as real as this world can get at any rate. The whole "drill = rampant male member" analogy that so many picked up on in the first one is definitely present here, which may have been more problematic if this hadn't featured such a female-centric tone, though even so the eventual fate of poor Courtney was rather cruel and defeatist, assuming you could make much sense of its string of "surprise" reveals. Nevertheless, this was better than the first instalment largely due to its downright, exuberant oddity. Music by Richard Cox.
