Tourist Trap (1979)

"You'll never be the same again!"

Plot

A group of young friends stranded at a secluded roadside museum are stalked by a masked assailant who uses his telekinetic powers to control the attraction's mannequins.

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A genuinely weird 70s horror film to try and pigeonhole, Tourist Trap falls somewhere in between the slasher and backwoods sub-genres. Part of it runs similarly to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre backwoods horror fad of the 70s whilst the other part would feel very much at home alongside Friday the 13^th, making it the perfect transitional film between the 70s and 80s. Whilst the plot centers around a roadside museum with gimmicks designed to scare tourists, you could apply this metaphor to the film itself. Tourist Trap is like a fairground funhouse, cheap and cheerful where you’ll feel you’ve been both cheated out of your money and satisfied that it did what it set out to do with the limited tools at its disposal. It’s an oddity to say the least, one which has enough about it to stand out even if it struggles to balance all the ideas it wants to throw your way.

One of producer Charles Band’s earlier efforts, Tourist Trap shamelessly nabs as much as it can from other horror films. The wax museum and grand house behind it reek of the Bates Motel complex from Psycho. As soon as you know that Slausen lives behind the wax museum, you know exactly what territory you’re going into. Davey, the psychopath from the front cover, is clearly modelled around Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre both in hulking physical stature and the fact he wears his victims faces, only as plaster casts rather than for real. The whole wax idea and recreating victims in wax comes from House of Wax. There are the telekinetic abilities (bizarrely out of place here amongst everything else) which Carrie would have been proud of. The smorgasbord of ideas shouldn’t work together, and Tourist Trap does flounder a few times under the weight of everything it’s trying to juggle.

This is particularly evident in the second half of the film. Whilst the first half is your traditional building up of the mystery and killing off a few characters, the second half feels a lot slower and sluggish. Perhaps this is down to the relatively small number of characters left surviving or just that stretching out the initial novel idea into a full-blown feature wasn’t going to work. There’s around half an hour of effective material here, but it’s lost amongst a ton of padding which won’t keep audiences engaged for as long as it needs to. Pacing is all over the place and just when Tourist Trap seems to get into gear, it grinds to a halt again. The big plot twist is predictable and the story heads exactly where you think it will.

With the wax museum and the house full of creepy mannequins, the cinematographer goes into overdrive to really get under your skin, shooting them from manner of angles and in various degrees of darkness and shadow. Director David Schmoeller, who along with producer Band brought the Puppet Master franchise to life, manages to create plenty of mood and unease with these mannequins, mouths all gaping and eyes sometimes moving. Coupled with a sinister score from composer Pino Donaggio and you have a film which ends up being far scarier than it should be and is downright surreal at times, even dreamlike. Whenever Davey is messing around with victims or his telekinetic abilities, Tourist Trap is at its best. The scene where he has a victim tied down to a table as he starts to apply plaster over her face, all the while telling her what’s going to happen as she starts to suffocate and die from fright, is genuinely disturbing.

Future Charlie’s Angel and Bond girl Tanya Roberts is one of the ‘teenagers’ whilst it’s the veteran actor Chuck Connors who gets to chew the scenery as Slausen. Connors was a big Western star back in the 50s but became typecast and faded away when the genre wasn’t popular anymore so it’s interesting to see him play against his usual roles in his later years. Connors is great, giving off some nice grandfatherly vibes as he helps the teenagers, but we know right from the offset that there’s something he’s hiding. Connors’ ability to switch between the vulnerable to the threatening in a heartbeat really helps to anchor the film, especially given the performances from the group of friends are fairly bog standard. They are largely interchangeable, and the script doesn’t do their characters any favours, having them make some really silly decisions even for horror movie standards.

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Final Verdict

Creepy and effective, Tourist Trap is still a gem of horror film with a great turn from Chuck Connors and some genuinely unsettling moments which it fails to capitalize on. Though these decent moments can be too spread apart and allow audiences to become disengaged, Tourist Trap deserves a far wider audience than it has.

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Tourist Trap Director(s): David Schmoeller Writer(s): David Schmoeller, J. Larry Carroll Actor(s): Chuck Connors, Jocelyn Jones, Jon Van Ness, Robin Sherwood, Tanya Roberts, Dawn Jeffory, Keith McDermott, Arlecchino Duration: 90 mins