TOURIST TRAP
***
Directed by David Schmoeller.
Starring Chuck Connors, Jocelyn Jones, Jon Van Ness, Tanya Roberts, Robin Sherwood, Dawn Jeffory.
Horror, USA, 90 mins, Certificate 15.
Released in the UK on Limited Edition Blu-ray via 101 Films on 7th July 2025
A largely underappreciated slasher from 1979, TOURIST TRAP sees four young travellers – one of whom is future Bond girl Tanya Roberts – break down in the middle of nowhere, only in this film they don’t meet a chainsaw-wielding butcher but rather a mysterious wax museum run by the kindly Mr. Sleusen (Chuck Connors). Unfortunately, there’s somebody else at work in the museum and pretty soon there may be some new exhibits that are eerily lifelike.
Tapping into the same vein as THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE with its off-kilter atmosphere, TOURIST TRAP does manage to create a few genuine chills with its depictions of wax mannequins moving around in the dark, and was the real influence on the 2005 HOUSE OF WAX rather than the 1953 Vincent Price film of the same name. However, what lets this film down is the quality of the acting, with Chuck Connors being solid while the standard from everyone else is very amateurish.
But who watches these films for the acting? It is fairly light on gore, but the sense of creeping dread is quite intense at times and there are plenty of very tight denim shorts and boob tubes on display to distract from what comes out of people’s mouths. The main villain is very reminiscent of Leatherface in his black-wigged matriarch guise and there is not too much originality going on when you break it all down, but the movie is effective enough, thanks to the creepiness of the wax models.
Released under 101 Films’ Black Label imprint, this edition comes with a few new extras in the way of interviews with Full Moon Pictures head honcho Charles Band, actress Jocelyn Jones, editor Ted Nicolaou and film critic Chris Alexander, plus an archive interview with director David Schmoeller, who also provides an audio commentary. There is a decent amount of extras for fans and it is nice to have the iconic artwork with the premium Black Label logo down the spine, but the Blu-ray image isn’t the greatest, with a lot of the blacks crushing and making the darker scenes look very muddy, as well as featuring a few pops here and there, especially towards the end.
Overall, TOURIST TRAP is a fun and creepy mid-tier slasher with a few exciting moments that make it worth sticking with, but, ultimately, it isn’t as good as the movies that it borrows from or the movies that borrowed from it. Perhaps a 2K remaster might be the key to making it a little more effective, rather than a standard HD transfer without any grading or much of a polish, but Black Label is there to collect together cult movies under one banner, and with this release it has added one more to its catalogue.
Chris Ward