Luna Theater's "Slasher'

Horror movies make obvious targets for satire. If they don't rely on a warped metaphysical worldview (like the dreamscapes in Nightmare on Elm Street) and killers to avenge their tormentors (e.g., Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th), they promote simplistic Freudian notions (abusive parents produce future monsters) or outdated Puritanical moralizing (the sluttiest girls die first). Even Alfred Hitchcock's alleged masterpiece Psycho blends this cheap childhood causality with anti-sex Christian mores in its creation of the Oedipal schizophrenic Norman Bates.

Moreover, the annoying paper-thin plots only invariably set up thoroughly unsympathetic characters whose lack of forethought inevitably precipitates the calamities that befall them. To paraphrase the French criminologist Jean Lacassagne, a horror film's cast gets the deaths they deserve.

The current twist on the horror genre— dubbed "gorno," to denote movies like Hostel and the Saw series— offers no more redeeming filmic or literary qualities. Instead it exploits audiences and actors alike through its near-erotic fetishization of torture. Which brings me to Slasher, Allison Moore's feminist spoof.

A Busters waitress

Slasher concerns the travails of a mother whose daughter finds work in one of these films. Sheena, whose very name screams, "Trailer-trash!", is a cocktail waitress at Busters, a restaurant chain creatively named after a sophomoric euphemism for women's breasts. She has never acted before, so a sleazy Hollywood producer named Marc (solidly portrayed by Chris Fluck) saves money by casting her as the "last girl"— that is, the last female killed— in his low-budget horror film, Blood Bath. As Marc puts it, Sheena is "pretty but not too pretty, innocent looking and would put up a fight." Katy O'Leary as Sheena fits the bill on all counts and, along with Davy Raphaely (in multiple roles), delivers hysterically intentional "bad acting" during the horror film shoot.

Slasher elicits laughs by intentionally indulging in everything that makes horror films atrociously unentertaining. Sheena's deformed feminist mother Frances, played by Lee Kiszonas, crawls out of a wheelchair to launch her killing spree. Deaths and near-fatalities are delivered via a drill or a staple gun. True to the genre, the other characters evoke stereotypes— Kelly Vrooman expertly evokes the smarmy viciousness of a religious fanatic— and only one sympathetic woman (endearingly played by Jenn Fellman) remains standing at the play's end.

Greg Campbell's direction soft-shoes the play's feminist undertones (Frances drags out little more than old tropes about glass ceilings and unequal wages anyway) while keeping the action taut, compelling and above all, riddled with enough humor to make Slasher the most deliciously humorous spoof I've seen in some time. As he did last year in Grace, Campbell transforms the Walnut Street's Studio 3 space into multiple overlapping milieus and locales that, rather than expose his production's tiny budget, instead concentrate the action to enhance the piece's dramatic and comedic power.

Tight-fitting tee-shirts

In the hands of costume designer Alison Johnson, O'Leary becomes a classic male chauvinist sex object, sporting tight fitting tee-shirts and black bras that draw even more attention to her ample chest. But for all playwright Moore's apparent social concerns, she never quite clarifies her views on the potential exploitation of women in horror films.

But who cares? As Sheena remarks, it can't be exploitation when they're paying her that much money, and Luna's 100 minutes of pure fun can't be exploiting an audience that clearly enjoys being in on the joke.