The “uncanny valley” refers to the idea that after a certain point, an approximation of human features begins to elicit uneasiness and revulsion - things below this point don’t have this effect because they’re recognizably non-human, and things above this point are effectively indistinguishable from human, but there’s a point where something looks human enough that you want to process it as human, but it’s non-human enough that you recognize that you shouldn’t, and this is perceptually queasy. The word “uncanny” itself can be defined as “mysterious, arousing superstitious dread, uncomfortably strange.”
And Tourist Trap, at its best, works both of these angles. It’s an oddity from the days before the rules of slasher films were really codified, and though it’s not especially nuanced, fits a few different ideas together awkwardly and only works in fits and starts, it’s an interesting take on the genre and not really like anything else I’ve seen.
We start off with a guy rolling a tire down a dirt road (like you do), arriving at a gas station. He goes inside, but there’s no attendant, and it’s clearly been deserted for some time. He goes poking around the back, looking for someone to assist him, but only finds a small room with a bed and what appears to be someone sleeping. When he tries to wake them, it becomes clear that it’s a mannequin that’s been posed in the bed. And, well, that’s not weird at all. And then the mannequin starts to move, things get lethally weird, and the young man dies before we can even learn his name.
His name, as it turns out, is (or was) Woody, and he was trying to get air for a spare tire because he and his friends Jerry, Molly, Eileen and Becky got a flat tire while they were driving through a remote stretch of what appears to be southern California. The rest of the gang wonders what’s taking Woody so long, and slap the temporary tire on their care in an effort to get to a phone. They see a sign for “Slausen’s Lost Oasis” and follow it, expecting the usual underwhelming natural feature and tacky gift shop, but instead find this legitimately nice green spot in the desert, complete with waterfall and swimming hole. Soon enough they meet Mr. Slausen himself, who explains that the “oasis” is closed, has been closed ever since the new highway came through and business dried up. But he’s amicable enough, albeit a little odd, and invites them back up to his house for a beverage while he helps Jerry work on the car. As it turns out, Mr. Slausen lives in what used to be the main attraction of the oasis - a wax museum - while his brother Davey lives in the nearby house. He tells them not to bother Davey.
He also has a lot of mannequins.
And this extends from the story into the way the film itself is constructed. The whole thing feels…fractured, somehow. It sort of jumps one from scene to another without a lot of narrative transition. But sometimes that works for it - you’ve got a group of people who stumble onto this weird little out-of-the-way setting, isolated from everything else, filled with mannequins and the choppiness of the film evokes a half-glimpsed, half-remembered feeling, like the sort of movie we might conjure up in our dreams, or remember waking up in the middle of after dozing off, as our still-asleep brain struggles to make sense of what it’s seeing on screen and not quite putting the pieces together correctly. The score, especially during the opening credits, bounces between your standard ominous minor-key strings and something jauntier, more playful. It’s kind of the musical equivalent of a haunted toy, or a funny clown hiding a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth, and given that we’re dealing with sinister inanimate figures, that seems entirely appropriate. And there is a decent amount of atmosphere - the locations are believably shabby and decaying like you’d expect a long-neglected tourist attraction to be, and though the performances are largely unremarkable, there are a number of moments that range from low-key uneasy to downright creepy.
But that’s when it works. There are more than a few places where it doesn’t. The off-kilter feeling extends to the pacing, as if the filmmakers realized too late that picking off all of these characters was the entire deal and so they have to spread them out so the movie isn’t just 45 minutes long. There are stretches of the antagonist monologuing that have an effectively off-putting strangeness to them but seem largely devoid of tension, and the third act drags out way too long with a minimum of actual action. And though the protagonists aren’t actively obnoxious, they are people who cannot leave well enough alone. Someone tells them not to do something, it becomes the first thing they do. And in this way it’s very much like the template for slasher films to follow - a bunch of young people on vacation getting picked off one by one because they consistently make the worst decisions they can, going beyond suspension of disbelief into naked contrivance, with a killer who seems to be able to be everywhere at once.
It does end pretty strongly though, getting back to the half-awake nightmare vibe and finishing on an extremely creepy freeze-frame (a technique I wouldn’t mind seeing come back) that feels like the hook to a good ghost story. But for as much that’s here that you don’t see every day, there’s also a lot that we will come to see way too much in all of the films that came afterward, That place between the unfamiliar and too familiar is, itself, an uncanny valley.
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
No comments:
Post a Comment