A group of young adults are on their way somewhere when one of them pops a tire. Woody, our victim, has no spare and must walk to the nearest creepy roadside tourist attraction. After arriving he tries to find someone to help only to wind up in a room with crazy ass mannequins popping out of everywhere to laugh evilly at him. After a very long bit of drama involving screaming and flying objects he is finally impaled with a pipe.

Meanwhile a second car of young adults (I refuse to call them teenagers!) has picked up Woody’s girlfriend and is on the way to find him when their car stalls out at the same tourist trap. The girls, being girls, decide to go skinny dipping while the other guy tries to fix the car. While swimming (showing absolutely no nudity except shoulders) a kooky old man shows up with a rifle. He introduces himself as Mr. Slausen and sits down to wax poetic about the freeway and his roadside attraction. Two of the girls think this strange considering they’re, you know, naked, but virginal Molly is smitten with the old coot.

They all follow Mr. Slausen back to his museum for a beer and the tools to fix the car. As the men go back out the girls are left to….oh I don’t know…..maybe find some way to get killed? Getting killed involves a crazy brother and a house chock full of freaky ass mannequins.

Every time I hear about this movie Stephen King’s name is attached to it. Apparently he listed it in Danse Macabre at one of his favorites. I looked it up and saw he spent about three sentences on it but hey that’s good enough for me.

If I had seen this movie in the 80’s there is no doubt in my mind that it would be one of my favorites of the decade (Ok it was 1979, close enough.) It certainly helped that I have an aversion to mannequins but that isn’t necessary to be creeped out by their enormous gaping maws and evil laughs, wails, and moans. You’ll be able to figure out who the killer is if you’ve seen more than three horror movies in your lifetime but that doesn’t take anything away either. The story is actually pretty clever with a telekinesis angle thrown in. The soundtrack is very atmospheric and way above par. Towards the end everything slows down and starts getting bogged down in sentiment but once everything kicks back in again the rest of the feature is loads of fun with a very chilling ending.

There is a very fine line between scary and silly and this movie manages to stay somewhere in the middle the entire time. For the most part I was chuckling through the whole thing but after I turned the movie off and went upstairs through my dark sleeping house I realized I was having the creeps as well. I hadn’t even noticed the movie doing that to me until it was over.

I recommend this movie to everyone but especially those with a fear of store mannequins. 7 out of 10 times I thought about how much better Tanya Roberts looks with red hair.