Greetings once more, and welcome to the third installment of Mockingbird’s Summer of Night! Labor Day is right around the corner and the summer set are shook that it’s all coming to a close. We four, however, are psyched to take the on-ramp into Autumn and hope to ease the transition with these roundtables on summer-related horror flicks. This week we are talking about Blake’s pick, the infamous 1979 film, Tourist Trap. This tale is pretty standard slasher fare: a crew of teens on a road trip break down and seek assistance from a local creep who may be exactly what he appears to be. The twist (if you want to call it that) is that the film’s villain turns his victims into mannequins.
Something interesting happened, though: Blake and his wife, Mel, had a baby and he wasn’t able to participate this time. (Trevor, meanwhile, endured a freaking hurricane but still managed to watch the movie like an absolute champion.) What we all thought sounded equal parts potentially hilarious and horrifying was feeding Blake-isms into ChatGPT to generate his contributions and to see how well they lined up with the Trash Panda Supreme himself. Though the Mbird editor wishes to register his objections, we couldn’t think of a better way to parody the mannequins of Tourist Trap. It went … well, you’ll see.
Ian: Boys, I have something to admit. This is the first time I’ve seen Tourist Trap —
BlakeGPT: No.
Ian: — stop, hold on, you can’t be “no”-ing me already. Anyway, it’s the first time, and I gotta tell you, I wouldn’t mind if I never had a first time.
Caleb: I first watched Tourist Trap on a lazy, humid Friday in July of 2019 when the sun was too high in the sky for me to be watching a slasher movie. But in retrospect, it was an ideal viewing experience for a movie with a sun-drenched setting and sideshow attraction score.
Ian: And what was your takeaway from that?
Caleb: Not a single thing about Tourist Trap is novel, but like the Fourth Beast from the Prophet Daniel’s dream, its uncanny chimerical nature is what makes it so frightening! It’s shamelessly indebted to Hitchcock’s Psycho, De Palma’s Carrie, and Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre —
BlakeGPT: Ian thought this was a Tobe Hooper film and he is to be mocked mercilessly for this.
Ian: Dang, man! Even the AI trash panda has to trounce me for that. Yes, dear readers, I made the mistake at one point of thinking this was a Tobe Hooper feature and I was wrong and Blake and Trevor have had a field day—well, more like week—hanging me out to dry for it.
BlakeGPT: Tobe Hooper hasn’t made everything, thankfully.
Ian: I’m with you there, faux-Blake.
Caleb: Honestly, though, I think that’s one of its strengths. Writer-Director David Schmoeller (also responsible for 1989’s aesthetically similar Puppet Master) seems to really understand that great art (even low-brow horror) is merely stolen from other great artists. What else is an off-the-beaten-path tourist trap supposed to be, anyway?
Ian: You know me, and I see the death drive at work in this tale as well as others like it. It’s never an accident that we end up at a fatal tourist trap, or a fatal summer camp, or fatal sleepover party: whatever the situation of our demise, we are gravitationally drawn there, seemingly haplessly. But we repress our consent to it from ourselves. The slasher is the exteriorization of our pursuit of our own destruction. Speaking of which! Trevor, your conditions are not exactly … ideal, right now. How did this flick intervene into Hurricane Idalia for you?
Trevor: Watching Tourist Trap while hunkering down during Hurricane Idalia in a room full of kids’ toys glaring at me is probably the ideal viewing conditions. The film is all about toxic nostalgia, cynicism toward change, and defiance towards death. The incongruity of a past, simpler way of life with the expanding tributaries that are those infernal highways that Mr. Slauson laments are embodied in the mannequins of his wax museum.
Ian: Yeah. I have a bit of a problem with mannequins …
Trevor: And like those stranded teens, we too can become trapped by the idea that the past offers us some kind of immortality.
Ian: As with Swamp Thing, I think you’re reading this film with a hermeneutics of charity that looks beyond what is explicitly given. I think that is lurking there within the husk of an unsuccessful PG-rated slasher flick; I only wish that thematic was directly explored within the film in a robust way. So I think it takes a thoughtful viewer like you to find that in Tourist Trap: not because you’re making it up, but because the subject is necessary for recognizing and retrieving content.
BlakeGPT: Tourist Trap, released in 1979, is a curious blend of horror and psychological thriller that leaves a haunting impression. It’s as if the film itself embodies the image of a slick saxophonist performing at a carnival: bizarre, attention-grabbing, and oddly captivating.
Ian: Wait … you’re still talking about The Lost Boys? Get with the now, BlakeGPT.
BlakeGPT: The power of suggestion and innuendo is prevalent throughout the film. In classic style it depicts rebellious youth confronting the constraints that adults become desensitized to. It also has lot of mannequins. Are they youth viewed with the proper optics? Are we the mannequins? Tourist Trap emerges from B-movie bins with all the subtlety of a gyrating sax player at a carnival, belting out an off-kilter tune that leaves you questioning your own senses. In this celluloid carnival of curious choices, one can’t help but howl at the absurdity that unfolds. The tale it tells is a mesmerizing sideshow act pulling you into the eerie embrace of rural gas stations.
Ian: Well, that’s a bit more coherent …
Trevor: Anyway … just like the past that Mr. Slauson seeks, the mannequins of his wax museum are false; they are facsimiles of life rather than genuine. To be sure, Slauson is deranged, but is he any more deranged than us when we believe in a Golden Age gospel, which is good news only to those who are privileged, wealthy, and powerful? In other words, the sick have no need of a doctor. When Mr. Slauson creates a wax mask or builds a mannequin, he is seeking to preserve the past. To preserve is to pervert though as we see not only in the dummies he constructs but also every time someone tries to reframe American history as Christian or the south’s cause in the Civil War as noble. Appearing as lifelike, the plastered faces are actually death masks for victims, which bring their demise just as much as when we cling to a false past in hopes that it will bring us salvation. Despite their apparent animation, there is about as much life in these puppets as there is coffee in a Pumpkin Spice Latte.
Ian: How dare you!
BlakeGPT: No! He’s right!
Ian: Are you serious right now? You’re trolling me with Trevor?
BlakeGPT: The world is the trash heap of this king panda.
Ian: [cradling his head in his hands] What have I done…
Caleb: [clears throat] One of the things that I think works about Tourist Trap is that its foils play so well off each other. Some of the most wooden acting you can imagine comes out of the main cast, but that only serves to make the sweet-talking hillbilly & tourist trap proprietor, Mr. Slausen, all the more menacing. Pino Donaggio’s bouncy, funhouse music makes the scenes in basement dungeons and nighttime wax museums all the darker. The scratchy baritone mumblings of the masked, plaster-obsessed killer perfectly complements the eerie high-pitched laughter of telekinetically manipulated mannequins.
Ian: That collision of mundane, all-too-human slasher with the paranormal was different and I appreciate that. It just wasn’t handled with much intelligence or charm, was the problem. Overall, this flick seemed to me to put a couple ideas into the slasher meatgrinder, albeit with a PG-rated mold, and presto, out came this.
Trevor: By the final sequence, the idea of the past as providing perfection is the fool’s gold that the final girl, Molly, is deluded into believing. She sees the mannequins as real, and her perception causes her to abandon reality. Like the false narratives of an American Golden Age themselves, the movie’s clumsy ending makes little sense. In the freeze frame shot before the credits, our protagonist drives down the highway with the dolls of each of her friends, actual idols that represent her inability to acknowledge death. And therein lies the actual tourist trap, when we are ensnared by a time or a place and believe it to be home, and forget that we are tourists, looking for the age to come and for a more permanent destination.
Ian: Trevor, you know … I just feel proud you’ve taken such bold steps out of the hermeneutics he was schooled in and into figural reading. Again, I just wish the film embodied that more and that that value wasn’t voiced only by Trevor. But hey, that’s why the world needs him, right? To plunder the crappy movies of the Egyptians?
BlakeGPT: The charm of Tourist Trap lies in its unapologetic absurdity. In a world where Stephen King’s narrative twists routinely falter, Tourist Trap emerges as a film that embraces its own enigmatic flaws. It’s a celluloid roller coaster that defies categorization, leaving you baffled and strangely entranced. While it does not achieve cinematic greatness, it certainly leaves an impression, reminding us that in the realm of the obscure, sometimes the most memorable moments are the ones that make the least sense.
Ian: Thank you, soulless simulacrum. Which is fitting, I guess, given the theme you boys are uncovering here.
Caleb: Tourist Trap is just like its namesake: a crass, low-budget spectacle with much promise and little delivery. But it reminds me of the Sasquatch Museum in the Appalachian foothills of northern Georgia, my home state. Is it convincing? Not really. But do I think about it all the time? Now and always!
Ian: Sounds like summer to me: “spectacle with much promise and little delivery.” Let us leave behind the elementary things of summer and progress towards the solid food of autumn!
Well, that was unusual but I think the three humans here managed to keep hold of the wheel until the end. I’m deactivating BlakeGPT and we look forward to having the true and better trash panda back next week for the final installment of the Summer of Night, with Trevor’s pick, From Dusk Till Dawn. See you then!
[…] Ian: Let’s just say, no one really liked Blake GPT. […]