Tourist Trap - The tourist trap

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title Tourist Trap - The tourist trap
Original title Tourist trap
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1979
length 90 minutes
Rod
Director David Schmoeller
script J. Larry Carroll ,
David Schmoeller
production Leonard Baker ,
Charles Band ,
J. Larry Carroll
music Pino Donaggio
camera Nicholas Josef von Sternberg
cut Ted Nicolaou
occupation

Tourist Trap is an American horror film from 1979 .

action

A group of young people, two men and three women, are on their way on vacation with two cars. Both cars broke down in a remote area. While the men are separately looking for help, the women discovered a swimming lake. When the girls bathe naked, Mr. Slausen appears, the initially friendly but odd owner of the lake. He offers his help to the group. At this point Woody, one of the men from the group, has already disappeared. The other four, Molly, Jerry, Eileen and Jerry's wife Becky, go with Slausen to his residence, a closed museum of wax figures and curiosities. Slausen tells them about his late wife and brother Davey, who built all the dolls and wax figures in the museum before he was poached by a large wax museum.

Mr. Slausen and Jerry go back to the car while the three young women stay in Slausen's museum. Before the two men leave, Slausen warns the women not to go outside or even into the mysterious neighboring house where Davey lives. But Eileen enters the house, comes across a collection of dolls and is killed by a killer wearing a mask made of Woody's face. Slausen returns to the women alone and tells them that Jerry drove his car into town. When he discovers that Eileen is gone, Slausen is angry about it, but goes to look for her. In fact, he finds her body in Davey's house. Assuming that his brother killed her, he doesn't tell the other two women about it and goes out again, supposedly to keep looking for her.

When Slausen is gone, Becky persuades the much more scared and somewhat uptight Molly to look for Eileen on her own. From Davey's house they hear Eileen's laughter. Becky goes into the house to look for Eileen and Woody, whom they now suspect to be there too. Molly does not dare to go into the house and returns to the museum. In the house, Becky is also attacked by the killer, who is now wearing a mask off Eileen's face. She survives, but is attacked by the dolls and ultimately locked in the basement by the killer with the mask. There she meets her husband Jerry and Tina, another young woman who kidnapped the killer who appears to be Slausen's brother and whose death Jerry and Becky have to watch.

It turns out that the killer has telekinetic abilities, which also seem to explain the coming to life of the dolls in Davey's house. The killer seems to be drawn to Molly in a special way, who is the only one still walking around freely, just like Slausen himself. On her escape from the killer, Slausen comes across in the car. During a confrontation, Molly shoots the killer and hits him with Slausen's gun. She fails to kill the killer, but she destroys his mask and discovers that it is Slausen. She is overwhelmed by him and taken to Davey's house.

Meanwhile, Jerry and Becky try to escape from Slausen's basement. There is a chase through the house.

backgrounds

Schmoeller was inspired by a number of bizarre designer mannequins that, as he reported in an interview on this film, were missing individual parts. They were mannequins that represented different ages. With increasing "age" these dolls were missing more parts. This inspired him to “bring the puppets to life” in the film in different ways. Some of them can only move their eyes, while others have their entire lower jaw dropping. The idea for this film came from his first film, The spider will kill you .

Schmoeller attributed a lack of success at the box office to the fact that die-hard horror fans were put off by the very revealing age rating. He assumed that those fans believed that a movie that was rated as adult would be unlikely to be particularly scary and would therefore not go to the cinema. In his book Danse macabre , Stephen King named Tourist Trap as one of his favorite films.

Web links