 Welcome to another episode of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies. Real movies this time, not made for TV stuff, we're off of that. But before we get started, what are we drinking? Today we are drinking Last Chance Lager. We're going to bring to you today 1979's Tourist Trap. Tourist Trap is directed by David Schmoller and he's done some other great horror movies too, ones that we've actually covered. Crawl Space. I really liked you. It's kind of a puppet master's cult classic. It stars Chuck Connors and this guy is quite the character in real life. Alongside him is Tanya Roberts and she's probably mostly known as Donna's mom in that 70's show. The movie starts out with this guy basically kicking a tire down the road. He's all strong, he's got his shirt open, he's all like the six-pack. He comes upon this like the rundown closed shack. Hello's anybody here and he hears like giggling. Kind of moaning. He sees a figure that's turned around on the bed. Turns around to him and starts like laughing and everything. This dummy thing comes out and starts, hehehehe, he starts laughing at him. Half of the mannequin breaks through the window and goes and breaks a hole in the door but something grabs him on the other side. And these doors open in this cabinet and you see these things starting to flutter and this pipe comes flying out, goes right into the middle of his back. And you hear like the blood dripping cuts to a jeep with the rest of these friends I guess in it that are driving down the road and they come across this guy's girlfriend waiting for him to come back at the side of the road. They come across this sort of tourist trap, this Lawson's Lost Oasis. The jeep kind of breaks down so the girls kind of get fed up and they go swim swimming in this lagoon. Who happens upon them is this guy wearing this giant cowboy hat, super 70's overalls with like bell bottoms to him, got a shotgun and it's Lawson himself who owns the property. His house turns out to be a great big museum as all these period pieces move and shoot guns. Everything in this museum seems eerily lifelike, feels like flesh, there's a house sort of beside this museum and he tells the girls to stay away from the house. One of the girls wanders off, wanders off to that house. An old couple there and they're sort of whispering and stuff, they're lifelike mannequins. She sees like this kind of nice red scarf, takes it off, puts it on herself and right away she sees a figure behind her and it's this weird masked figure and he starts moving his head around and things start moving and breaking off the walls. The scarf that she put on slowly starts to tighten with nobody touching it. So Lawson returns to the museum without Jerry, they couldn't get the jeep working. He notices that Eileen is gone so they all kind of split up to go look for her. Becky goes into the house, the mannequins start moving and she's like attacked by them, kind of blacks out and wakes up again and she's in this basement and Jerry's there with her and on this kind of like slab there's this other girl who they don't know tied down. This masked figure comes down the stairs and starts talking to them, tells them that he is Lawson's brother. He then takes his plaster and starts putting it on this girl's face. First your skin will start to burn, you'll die of a fright before you suffocate. That's scary, he describes every aspect of her dying. Now Lawson and Molly are still looking for Eileen and now Becky's missing. So Lawson gives Molly shotgun, says I'm going to go inside and you'll know I'm okay because I'll put on the radio and I'll come right back out. Then out of the corner the masked figure comes out, hits him in the face of the butt of the shotgun, his mask starts to crumble and that's where we're going to end it. If you want to find out what happens at the end of tourist trap, watch the damn movie. One of the things that sets this movie apart I think is the story of it. How weird it is, but also how cohesive it is too. The beginning really hits you in the face with that crazy scene in the gas station, right? What's going on? And then it slows right down, but then it picks back up. It picks up, the pacing is really good and it's a neat blend between a slasher and like a supernatural movie. There's a killer, but he doesn't really go around stabbing people. It's got these weird powers that he uses which is neat, it's different. You don't see that in other movies. Yeah, he's not blindly going around killing people. There's a method to it all. Psychological end of it, right? Yeah. Tourist trap has a lot of neat things going for it. Like all the settings are so cool. You got that oasis, the wax museum, and then the old house. The old mannequins. And then even outside in the woods. They're all very distinct and neat locations and the sound design is super cool too because each location has its own little sound in the background that you associate with that location. Everything's memorable, right? Yeah. Each setting, like you were saying, it's almost like its own character. And the settings kind of remind you a bit of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, while it's the same production designer as Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So there is a bit of a link there. Yeah, this is like the late 70s so it's kind of like this exploitation sort of deal that you think is going to. You think it could go that route. Yeah, but it really doesn't. One of the few movies in this genre actually did not get an R rating. There was no nudity and very little actual like blood and stuff like that. And we have to mention that the performance of Chuck Connors in this movie is absolutely outstanding. He is so damn good in this. You look at this guy like, fuck, not only is he a great actor, do you read about him? Like the guy played in the NBA and he played Major League Baseball? Like, what can't this guy fucking do? He wasn't their first choice to play that role. It was actually Jack Palin. Chris Trep. There was another first choice director and that was John Carpenter. Which is really amazing. I think he wanted too much money to do the movie and they couldn't financially make it work. So then Schmoller just directed it himself and it was the first movie he directed. This movie was, it was one of the very first movies that I actually remember us ever renting from a little place down the, on the corner called Camper Carell. Which was half movie store, half cowboy shop. And it made such an impression on us. I know where the rental store had that movie either, so when Camper Carell closed and it couldn't find it. But forever, for years, we could not find tourist trap to either rent or buy. You couldn't just watch movies on YouTube or on the internet. We had to find them, we had to physically go and find this. One day, in high school. Yeah, we stopped in an HMV and it was there, it was like on the shelf. I was like, holy shit, it's tourist trap. I was like, whoa, I ended up buying it and I didn't even have a DVD player at the time. I just bought it just because it's tourist trap. But I had a DVD player, so we took it back to my place and watched it that night for the first time. We're probably like 15 years or something like that. That wouldn't have been 15 years, would have been maybe 10. Yeah, about 10 years. 10-12 years. Yeah. You want to check out a good like 70s style era slasher that's different than pretty much everything else out there at the time. You have to check out tourist trap. It's a lot of fun, but it's still scary. A lot of memorable moments and one great memorable killer. Oh yeah, and a great payoff at the end too, right? And something that you sympathize with on the flip side of it. If you like House of Wax and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I think you're really going to like this movie. Yeah, it's kind of a mishmash between the two. A lot of parallels there. Yeah, so in the meantime, keep drinking.