Five friends are travelling along the back roads of America looking for tourist spots to hang out at and enjoy. After one friend goes missing whilst looking for a spare wheel to replace a flat, the other four friends get in a car and go look for him. As they’re driving they come across a small hidden oasis on private property. Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors) who owns the land the oasis is on, finds them and asks where they have come from. He invites them into his home, telling them they can wait there while he helps repair their car.

Mr. Slausen also runs a roadside museum, full of an assortment of wax dummies. He tells the group that he used to run it with his brother who left long ago to make dummies for some of the bigger companies. He asks that while he goes with one of the group, Jerry (Jon Van Ness), that the girls don’t wander off and poke around the property.

Which is just about the time things take a turn for the worse. A masked maniac with what appears to be telepathic powers, begins to stalk the girls, slowly making them apart of the roadside attraction. This is the sort of movie killer that just happens to always be in two places at once, whatever could it mean? Yes that was sarcasm. This is a dire movie by all accounts. Chuck Connors is good as the elderly farmer Mr. Slausen, but the rest of the cast really just can’t act. The opening 10 minutes of the film was creepy I will admit, but it rapidly goes downhill from there. The voice of the ‘killer’ is just ridiculous, and jettisons any hint of fear or menace the killer may have brought to the film. Going the Michael Myers/Halloween route and keeping the killer silent would, in my opinion, have been the better way to go.

As with all these films, the scantily clad ladies are all dispatched in variously gruesome ways, but as a viewer you really don’t care. I did hear that the blu ray version is actually five minutes shorter than all the other versions, due to some underhanded tactics by Charles Band and the group at Full Moon. That said, I really fail to see how an extra five minutes of footage would make this abysmal film any better. One for the bargain bin I feel. This copy of Tourist Trap was kindly provided by the very kind folks over at http://www.88films.co.uk.

1/5

JM