Slaughter High (1986)

1986
Directed by Mark Ezra, Peter Litten and George Dugdale
Starring Caroline Munro, Simon Scuddamore, Carmine Iannaconne and Donna Yeager

Out of the pantheon of slasher flicks released in the wake of the success of Friday the 13th, Slaughter High has got to be one of the most downright STRANGE entries in the entire subgenre.  It's hard to explain.  It hits all of the familiar notes that slashers were known for, boasting gratuitous sex scenes, fake blood geysers and tits aplenty...but it does all this in a way that is just...different.  For starters, the killer.  This dude is completely unlike anything I've ever seen in the countless Friday-Halloween-Nightmare films and their ilk, and I'm not just talking about his appearance.  Yes, he's pretty weird looking.  Kind of like a decrepit Abe Vigora-esque court jester wearing a letterman's jacket.  But it's more the setup and the methodology that this movie truly differentiates itself and veers into true blue "the fuck?" territory.

Is the movie any good?  Unfortunately, not really.  As is often the case with slasher flicks with micro budgets and grand aspirations of hooking up with a whole lot of hardcore genre fans, it shoots big and falls hard.  BUT...it falls hard in a way that is intermittently entertaining as opposed to the "please inject poison cyanide into my eyeballs" kind of way that, say, My Soul to Take is.  I still want my $3 3D deposit back, Craven.

With that, the movie.

PLOT:  One of the tried and true tropes of slasherdom revolves around building up some kind of past evil/heinousness to haunt the present day, and this movie gives us just that in the prologue sequence as we pay witness to a group of perfectly happy and hot teenage friends mocking and ridiculing poor Marty Rantzen.  Before you can say "exposition," a prank goes horribly wrong and Marty is burned beyond repair.  The movie then launches forward several years, where we meet all of the prankers in their adult forms.  They have been invited back to the ol' high school for a reunion, and upon arriving find out that their group is the only attendees.  Slasher fans, guess where we're going from here.  It seems that Marty has made his way to the local hardware and costume stores and has revenge on his mind, and it isn't long before limbs start flying.  Of course, the "nerd looking for retribution" concept had been done in other films and has been done a few times since, but enver in such as WEIRD a way as this movie manages to pull off, moreso in tone than content.  This is a movie where a group of characters are trapped in a building, eventually find some of said characters' corpses, can't leave the building, and it somehow seems even MORE laughable than usual.  I don't know, maybe it's just me.
PLOT RATING:  ** out of ****.

CHARACTERS AND ACTORS:  The main character of sorts is Carol (Caroline Munro), the girl who first lured Marty to the prankfest with the promise of bathroom sex as a teenager.  As an adult, she's a semi-successful actor, and Munro is able to give her a decent amount of chutzpah.  Let's put it this way - she's the only character in this movie that doesn't immediately stand out as future jester fodder, which should say something about the other jokers we have present for this round of slahser flick roll call.  We've got the usual douchy guy, athletic guy, slutty girl, etc., with the added bonus that all of these people were played by English actors using fake American accents.  It shows in the delivery.  Alan Rickman these guys ain't.  This is a slasher that falls victim to the unfortunate "root for the killer to wipe another annoying face off the screen" syndrome, and as such, my complicated math formula needs to dock some star points here.
CHARACTERS AND ACTORS RATING: * out of ****.

COOL FACTOR:  Many slasher films have cool-looking and/or simply cool villains, but this isn't one of them.  Take a good look at the above picture.  Just look.  Then extrapolate that to the idea that his every appearance is accompanied with drippy, dreary music that is supposed to convey endless terror and try not to laugh.  Fortunately, what this movie DOES have is plenty of effective and pretty darn violent murder set pieces.  There's electrocution during coitus, stabbings aplenty and one pretty damn nifty sequence where a girl is scalded horribly in a rigged acid bath.  Think the similar sequence from Halloween II times a thousand.  The kills in this movie are indeed a treat, and enough to lull you out of the state the catatonic state that you'll be stuck in for a majority of the 90-minute running time.
COOL FACTOR: *** out of ****.

OVERALL:  A real mixed bag of a movie, to be sure.  One thing that I couldn't point out above is that the film has a tiny budget and really looks it; some directors are masters of disguising their lack of funding.  This movie's THREE (and yes, three people manned the director's chair for Slaughter High, which is usually a very telling sign that something was amiss during production) directors are not quite as talented.  Of course, ANOTHER thing to point out is that this is a movie that has one of THOSE endings.  Advance warning: the ending of this movie will piss you off, likely a whole lot.  It's not quite up to the "it's only a dream" standard, but it is indeed a total copout that will leave you feel angry and cheated.  Either that or I need to take cheesy '80s body-count flicks less seriously.  Thus, while the flick has its moments of very entertaining ineptness in the form of its crummy camerawork and acting combined with some solid kills, I can only recommend it for a rental.
OVERALL RATING: * 1/2 out of ****.  Would have been a **, but man, that ending.