I didn’t go out looking for horror films in 1979. I knew about Alien, of course. Everyone did. Even in a small town. I didn’t see the movie until many years later, though. I was still in high school and money was scarce (college was all either scholarship, loan, or work-study money). If Tourist Trap ever came to town I didn’t know about it. In fact, I didn’t know about it at all until reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. Enough time has passed that the movie is now streaming for free and, indeed, it is David Schmoeller’s first film. Critics didn’t love it, but King thought it had some appropriate eeriness, so why not? It isn’t horrible—I’ve definitely seen worse. And movies with animated mannequins hit that uncanny valley at just the right angle, even if poorly written.
The story’s a bit convoluted. Five young people are on vacation and get drawn into, well, a tourist trap. There’s a fair amount of psychokinesis that goes on, and the tourist trap is Slausen’s Lost Oasis, which is filled with animated wax-work figures/mannequins. These are what make the film creepy. As the plot unfurls, the kids get killed off, one-by-one, as horror viewers come to expect. There is a bit of a “reveal” toward the end, so I won’t spoil it. It is fair to say that insane antagonists were fairly common by 1979 and that the blurring of real people and manufactured ones is a bit unnerving. There are some questions of motivation, and many times the characters don’t take the obvious steps to help themselves. Still, the movie isn’t too bad.
I was drawn to it, having seen Schmoeller’s real groaner, Netherworld. And King’s recommendation. There is something about movies that are lacking in undefined ways that keeps you watching. I was curious how Tourist Trap was going to end up. There were several points at which I thought I’d figured it out, only to be told, “but wait, there’s more!” The more wasn’t always really worth waiting for, but the ending has a bit of a payoff. There is some slasher aesthetic here, but it’s unconventional enough that you may at least be kept guessing. The thing that the movie gets right is that human figures that aren’t human are scary. Many films play on this, of course. Even if you’ve seen others, it still tend to ramp up the shudder factor a bit. It only took four decades for me to stumble into this tourist trap, and it was a reasonable brief vacation from reality.