The best thing I could say about Pillow Party Massacre is that the director did in fact pull off making a feature length film which is no easy feat.
There is sincerity and passion behind this project, and two or three of the kills are creative and use some decent makeup effects. This is definitely a step in the right direction for the creator and hopefully a learning experience which will lead to bigger and better projects down the line. But all that being said, I cannot recommend this film as entertainment value on any level.
Despite its tongue-in-cheek title, Pillow Party Massacre never becomes the silly 80's-inspired romp that it keeps on promising to be.
The script is thinner than most direct-to-video horror films would allow their own script to be. Every line of dialogue in this film is soulless exposition, and none of the characters have any personality or identity. By the end of the film I couldn't remember a single character's name, and the few moments where the screenplay tries to be meta are lazy and uncommitted. You can tell that the filmmakers have intended to make their own version of Scream without the wit, knowhow or brilliance that made that film work. And the resulting project is soulless, boring and so glacially paced that the short running time felt phenomenally longer than it actually was.
The film is also riddled with technical flaws. The CGI looks unbelievably cheap and not in an ironic way, and the majority of the kills look incredibly fake without it even being humourous. There are way too many dance sequences in the film which drag on for way too long with the intro scene being the most notable example, and the camera seems to linger on the feet and legs of the characters for an uncomfortably long amount of time as if the director of photography has some kind of strange fetish. The colour grading is terribly off, the sound editing is consistently weak, there are numerous lines of dialogue that are obviously dubbed or sometimes layered multiple times out of order, and the cinematography seems to be using a camera that operates on a steadycam gimble yet also manages to shake all the time. Why you would shake the camera whilst also trying to steady it goes completely beyond me, it's like ordering a diet coke with a side of sugar.
Ultimately, the film is just boring. It was made with the best intentions but without proper expertise or a screenplay worth filming. I didn't laugh, I wasn't scared, I wasn't entertained. This film is no massacre, it's a drag.
