When his car has a flat tire, Woody (Keith McDermott) seeks a gas station in an empty road. He finds a deserted place and is attacked by mannequins in a room and dies. Meanwhile his girlfriend Eileen (Robin Sherwood) waits for him in the car. However their friends Jerry (Jon Van Ness),Molly (Jocelyn Jones) and Becky (Tanya Roberts) arrive and they decide to look for him. They find a paradisiacal waterfall but their car breaks down. While Jerry tries to fix the car, the girls bath in a lake. Out of the blue, an old man arrives and he introduces himself as Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors),who owns the place. He brings Molly, Becky and Eileen to his house and tells that he would help Jerry. They find a waxwork museum with armed cowboys. Eileen decides to leave the house to find a telephone, but she is attacked and strangled by a masked stranger. Who might be the killer and how will he girls flee from the spot?

"Tourist Trap" is an unoriginal slasher with a mad serial-killer that seems to be a magician. The plot is totally predictable and how the insane killer controls the mannequins is not explained. In addition, the boring music score by the Italian musician Pino Donaggio is annoying. My vote is six.

Title (Beail): "Armadilha para Turistas" ("Tourist Trap")

A group of young friends stranded at a secluded roadside museum are stalked by the owner's brother, who has the power to control his collection of mannequins.

This film is pure Full Moon, though it actually predated the birth of the company. The use of mannequins fits right into Full Moon's niche (dolls, puppets, et cetera). The production value is low, the filming schedule was short (24 days). And yet, it works. I am not going to say this is one of the greats or a lost classic, but I can safely say it is underrated -- considering how few people have heard of it, it is much better than you might think.

Stephen King praised the picture, saying the film "wields an eerie spooky power, as wax figures begin to move and come to life in a ruined, out-of-the-way tourist resort." The fact King singled out this film says something, though I am not sure what. Many films revolve around a car breaking down and people taking shelter in a dilapidated house or gas station. And yet, he mentioned this one in his book (Danse Macabre). That is probably the best endorsement they could ask for.

While there is very little of note in the movie (as mentioned, it follows the well-worn horror plot and adds little new to that) it is still effective, and somehow works. The characters are not developed, we have no reason to hope that any of them survive, and there is a plot twist or two that really make no sense. Do I know how the mannequins come to life or why Davey had telekinesis powers? No. I just assume the writers blended "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" with "Carrie" and this was what cooked up the oven.

This could probably be called the film where Charles Band hit his stride. While he had worked as a director and producer since 1973 (following in his father's footsteps),this was probably his earliest success (though "Fairy Tales" does have a nice cult following and was the debut of 1980s scream queen Linnea Quigley). How much say he had over this production is not known, but I would boldly say it was the first thing he produced that hit home with the horror crowd.

Although I am fond of bashing Charles Band whenever possible, I have to give him credit for this film. If he did nothing else, he successfully recruited a group of loyal soldiers with which to build Full Moon. Writer-director David Schmoeller had one prior job (as intern on "Capricorn One"),but went on to make Full Moon classics "Puppet Master" and "Crawlspace". Likewise, editor Ted Nicolaou had only been a production assistant on "Texas Chain Saw Massacre", and went on to helm Full Moon's "Subspecies" franchise.

Writer Larry Carroll was early in his career, too. He had previously done editing for "Texas Chain Saw Massacre", "Dracula's Dog" "The Hills Have Eyes" and "Massacre at Central High", making him the most experienced of the new recruits... but we must give Band a little recognition for drawing Carroll over to the dark side before he escaped and became a writer for dozens of cartoon programs including "Dennis the Menace", "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and "Thundercats". (Yet another "Chain Saw" veteran was Robert A. Burns, who designed the mannequins.)

Perhaps most interesting was the music. Not that it was memorable, but it is quite remarkable that Richard Band was not the composer, and his role was filled by the much more celebrated Pino Donaggio (whose fee allegedly was 1/6 of the film's budget). Donaggio might be known to horror fans as a collaborator of Dario Argento and Brian DePalma, but even in his earlier days he was closely allied with horror -- churning out scores for "Carrie", "Piranha" and "Don't Look Now". On the surface, you might think Charlie Band was lucky to get Chuck Connors or Tanya Roberts, but you would be wrong (Roberts had not yet starred in "Charlie's Angels"). David Schmoeller's catch of Donaggio was the big score.

One of the oddest, most strikingly eerie and creepy horror films to come out of the 70's, "Tourist Trap" even by the loose, free-wheeling, convention-defying "anything goes" standards of its time rates as a real weirdie. Yet, it's the picture's very strangeness -- a masterfully mounted uncanny atmosphere of pervasively off-kilter supernatural dread which from the get-go registers as powerfully spooky and becomes more increasingly opaque and frightening as the film progresses, offering up ample shocks amid a few scattered moments of surreally lovely dream-like elegance and ending on a bitterly ironic, crushingly nihilistic note with a haunting final image that's hard to shake -- which makes it such a unique and singularly unnerving experience.

Five teenagers traveling through the desolate California desert by car get hopelessly lost. They stumble across "Slausen's Lost Oasis," a seedy, rundown roadside dive that's one part gas station, three parts crummy wax museum, and all parts ratty and foreboding. The joint's lonely, seemingly friendless and harmless owner Slausen (juicily overplayed with infectiously hammy brio by Chuck Conners) turns out to be a deranged psychic killer with lethal telekinetic powers. Slausen brings his freaky assortment of uncomfortably human-like mannequins to life and picks off the kids one by one so he can add them to his ever-growing collection of victims.

Director David ("Puppermaster," "The Arrival") Schmoeller adeptly wrings every last ounce of tension he can squeeze from the pleasingly ambiguous and open-ended script he co-wrote with J. Larry Carroll. (Said script's stubborn refusal to provide some rational excuse for all the bizarre stuff which transpires throughout the movie, often wrongly criticized as one of the film's principal weaknesses, is actually the movie's key strength, giving the picture the scary, anything-and-everything-can-happen, common-logic-be-damned quality of a true nightmare come horrifically to life which never would have been achieved if there was some kind of credible explanation offered for what's happening.) Pino Donaggio's beautifully chilling, understated score, Nicholas von Sternberg's shadowy cinematography, and Robert A. Burns' grubby, cramped production design add immensely to the film's profoundly unsettling mood. Excellent performances are another significant plus, with the pretty, perky Jocelyn Jones (Ellie-Jo Turner in "The Great Texas Dynamite Chase") particularly fine and personable as the most resilient and sympathetic of the endangered teens. Even Tanya Roberts fares well as a luckless lass who has a knife levitated into her head. Offbeat and unusual, "Tourist Trap" is well worth visiting.