Psycho (1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Carrie (1976) collide head-on in David Schmoeller’s derivative but hugely enjoyable feature debut, an expansion of some of the ideas found in his impressive award nominated short student film The Spider Will Kill You (1976). The pieces may all be familiar, but Schmoeller moves them into an interesting configuration, then slathers the result with an off kilter and unsettling atmosphere.

Eileen (Robin Sherwood), boyfriend Woody (Keith McDermott) and their friends Becky (Tanya Roberts), Jerry (Jon Van Ness), and Molly (Jocelyn Jones) are travelling through the desert in a couple of cars. Eileen and Woody vehicle suffers a puncture and he wanders off to find an out of the way desert petrol station where he’s killed by supernatural forces, impaled on a metal pipe as hideous mannequins that appear to have a life of their own look on. The others wind up at a “tourist trap,” Slausen’s Lost Oasis, where owner Mr Slausen (Chuck Connors) seems affable enough and eager to help them find the missing Woody. Though warned to stay inside the museum, Eileen wanders off to a nearby house where she’s attacked by a grotesque figure in mask, strangled to death by her own scarf and turned into a mannequin. The others initially believe that the killer is Slausen’s brother Davey (Shailar Coby) – but he turns out to be Slausen himself who manipulates the mannequins in his museum using telekinesis while posing as insane sibling.

Schmoeller turns his magpie-like borrowings into something unusual and memorable, a cut or two above the glut of Halloween (1978) clones that were already starting to turn up in ever-increasing numbers. Indeed, some effort was made to push the film as a slasher when it first came out, but it doesn’t really sit comfortably in any category, least of all the slasher. This misguided attempt to position it as something it very clearly wasn’t, might go a little way to explaining why Tourist Trap was so poorly received when it opened in March 1979 – that and the inexplicable ‘PG’ rating it was awarded by the MPAA which was something of a urn off for hardcore horror fans who expected ‘R’ at the very least. It was pilloried by the critics and even today can be found being lampooned by the clueless RiffTrax crowd, but it deserves better. It’s clever, imaginative and the mannequins are the very stuff of nightmares and all with none of the gore and nudity on which the genre was becoming increasingly reliant at the time.

The acting is a bit ropey, except for Chuck Connors who is excellent as the deranged Slausen. Connors got the role after Schmoeller’s first and second choices, Jack Palance and Gig Young, both turned it down and he apparently hoped to relaunch himself as a horror heavy. The failure of the film probably put paid to that and his only subsequent genre roles were in the undistinguished likes of Summer Camp Nightmare (1987), Maniac Killer (1987) and the television film High Desert Kill (1989), but he’s extremely good here. The rest are a largely forgettable lot with only Tanya Roberts standing out today thanks to a future as one of Charlie’s angels and a Bond girl.

But acting isn’t the thing here – it’s the atmosphere that’s all important. It’s hard to pin down exactly why Tourist Trap is so unsettling (those horrible mannequins do much of the heavy lifting) but it feels quite unlike any other horror film from the period. Even the telekinesis angle, forced on Schmoeller by producer Charles Band to capitalise on the popularity of Carrie, works fine (though we never find out how and when Slausen came by this ability), adding a strange supernatural twist to an already offbeat ambience.

Among the horror highlights are the appearance of the killer (played by one “Shailar Coby,” actually a pseudonym for Connors) who looks like Leatherface on a particularly bad day – huge, lumbering, masked and sporting an outsized wig; Tine being covered in plaster as Slausen, still in disguise, calmy talks her through what will happen to her as she dies; and a startling scene where Jerry comes to the rescue of Molly only for Slausen to remove his head and limbs, revealing him to have been a particularly lifelike mannequin all along.

All this plays out to the accompaniment of a gorgeous Pino Donaggio score (he had, of course, scored the aforementioned Carrie). Donaggio was in town scoring Piranha (1978) for Joe Dante and Schmoeller chanced hi arm and was delighted when the composer agreed to cone on board. It’s a score as unpredictable and atmospheric as the film itself, though distributor Irwin Yablans was none too pleased with it – he’d expected a synthesizer score akin to those composed by John Carpenter for his films (according to producer J. Larry Carroll in the book It Came from the 80s! Interviews with 124 Cult Filmmakers by Francesco Borseti, Schmoeller originally wanted Carpenter to direct Tourist Trap). There was little he could do about it though and Donaggio’s score remained, a haunting set of cues that mix abstract sounds, harpsichords, fragments of female voices and other oddities to remarkable effect.

Though it’s still ridiculed from time to time, Tourist Trap is finally finding its audience, one captivated by its dreamlike atmosphere, it’s inexplicable logic and above all those truly horrible mannequins. You’ll guess the identity of the killer easily enough and the sometimes haphazard plotting might irritate some. But it’s the sort of film that manages to transcend these flaws by virtue of sheer oddity. It was out of touch with horror sensibilities of the time – it opened in the States in the same summer as Alien, The Brood, The Driller Killer and Phantasm among others – and felt slightly old-fashioned and reticent at the time. But time has been kind and today although it’s eclipsed by its contemporaries, it stands as a decent and always very watchable attempt to do something unusual with the genre.

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