Tourist Trap

When the end of October rolls around, I spend a lot of time scrolling through my streaming sites trying to decide how I want to round out the month. I had a bunch of tabs open on my computer of movies I wanted to watch but I started running out of days. When I get to this point I have to weigh what I want to see and what can wait. One thing I noticed this year was I hit contemporary horror very hard. So I started eliminating movies made in the last five years. After still being unsure of what to watch, I decided to go with the oldest movie still on my list. So let's talk about...

Tourist Trap (1979)

A group of kids are out on a drive when one of them gets a flat tire. Unfortunately for him and his lady, the spare has no air. So he wanders down the highway, rolling the tire until he comes across a gas station. While looking inside the seemingly empty building he gets locked into a room with a bunch of mannequins. Suddenly all the mannequins start moving and laughing at him. The room shakes, things fly off the shelves and when he breaks a hole in the door, something on the other side grabs hold of him and refuses to let go. He is stuck there as the things flying at him become more dangerous until he's eventually impaled by a steel rod. I have to say, the visual of someone stabbed by a steel pole and then blood seeping out the other end of it is always a crowd-pleaser.

Eventually, the friends catch up and turn off the road to a tourist trap off the highway. Unfortunately, the other dude has some engine trouble, so the ladies do a little swimming until the owner of the area, an older gentleman in overalls, finds them and offers to take them to his mannequin museum while he and the dude fix the car. While there he shows them around the mannequin museum full of the things that he's made over the years. It's a little creepy, but he seems nice enough and keeps giving them ice-cold Dr Peppers, so everyone's happy. Eventually, they realize that the reason these mannequins are so life-like is because he's using real people and dumping the plaster over them. Oh yeah, he also has telekinesis.

This movie is on Peacock, or it was if you're reading this sometime in the future, but I had never heard of it until I saw James Rolfe review it a few years ago. It's not going to set the world on fire, but I'd agree with Stephen King that it's a hidden gem. While what's on screen is entertaining, the behind-the-scenes stuff is insane. Cocaine was everywhere. At one point the First Assistant Director said he was hit on the head with a bag of it that fell out of the pocket of a lighting rigger. Crazy.

For such a low-budget movie from the '70s. This has some good kills. My favorite even involves no blood but is all kinds of disturbing. The baddie has a woman tied up in his basement and he's globbing plaster on her face. The physical act is bad enough, but what makes it so harrowing is that he describes exactly what he's going to do next and how it's going to feel. It's so disturbing and it only gets worse as he goes on. Near the end he's telling her he's going to close off her nose and mouth, but not to worry, she won't die through suffocation. He says her heart will give out due to fright before she runs out of air. Shortly after he says that she starts convulsing and you can hear her heartbeat speed up until it, and the convulsing, gets weaker until it stops altogether. It's incredibly effective and horrifying at the same time.

I mentioned the telekinesis earlier and it's a bit off, but it works for some reason. It gives the movie a different feel and adds to the creep factor. The guy can move around the mannequins so it seems like they're alive and when you're trapped in a house with so many of them, it is extra creepy watching their eyes follow you around the house and hearing them whisper to you despite no one being around. The movie doesn't explain it, and the baddie doesn't seem to understand why he has it either, but he uses it to great effect. I didn't know that I needed a bad guy with mutant powers, but the movie is better for it.

I also love the final shot in the movie. We are shown throughout the final act that the man is clearly insane and has taken a shine to the protagonist. While he's explaining to her what he has planned he breaks down and explains why he turned crazy. He caught his brother and wife "whoring" as he put it and then killed them both. Not wanting to lose his wife, he turned her into a mannequin and has been capturing people and turning them ever since. As the movie goes on, Molly, the main character, is starting to lose her grip on reality and sees the mannequins as real people. It starts to happen so frequently that you can't tell what's real and what's fake. The final shot is her driving away in the Jeep with her mannequinned friends sitting in the car like you'd stick your GI Joes or Barbies in a toy car. She may have survived, but she's broken and has lost her mind.

It's a solid movie that takes a few unexpected twists and turns to get to a place that I certainly wasn't expecting when I first decided to watch it.