Entry 79: Slaughter High (1986)

Slaughter High (1986)

Dir: George Dugdale, Mark Ezra, Peter Mackenzie Litten

"Marty majored in cutting classmates."


I've been slacking off!  I'd resolved to double my output during this, my favorite of months, but here we are a week into October and I'm just now getting to an entry.  Life's been hectic lately, but tonight I'm taking some time off and paying a visit to the graduating class of Slaughter High...

This picture starts off with a pretty fucking great garage rock-sounding opening credits theme as we're introduced to the student body of Doddsville County High School.  It's April Fool's Day, and sexpot Carol (Caroline Munro, StarCrash) decides to play a prank on insufferable nerd Marty (Simon Scuddamore).  She makes this unfortunate loser strip down to his skivvies in the shower of the girls' locker room as a prelude to some serious deep boning, but instead pulls the curtain away to reveal a bunch of her "cool" friends pointing and laughing at this nude nebbish.  We get a LOT of unfortunate dick and taint shots as the jocks drag his naked body around the locker room before giving him a swirly.  At this point, I should also point out that the sexy-as-hell Munro (one of my favorite B-movie actresses) was 36 years old when she was cast as a high schooler in this movie!  Later, another prank-gone-awry results in Marty getting burned with nitric acid and set on fire...Hilarious, right?!  Flash-forward ten years and Carol has become a B-movie starlet (art imitating life?) working for a producer whose office is adorned with posters for Pieces and Infra-Man!  Carol decides to attend her 10-year class reunion but, curiously, she arrives to find the school in a state of disrepair and, suspiciously, the only other attending guests are her friends who helped to prank Marty!  Yeah, you guessed it; this "reunion" is a fake put on by vengeful, deformed Marty for the sole purpose of killing the shit out of his former tormentors.  As you'd expect, Marty (now hidden behind a creepy jester's mask) stalks Carol and friends one-by-one, dispatching them via coat hanger through the head, butcher knife through the torso, a bathtub filled with acid (this one uses some surprising, Wolf Man-style time-elapse photography), riding lawnmower dropped from a hoist (creative!), electrocution-via-metal-bedframe, drowning in a septic tank and, in the film's most technically impressive kill, he tricks a mark into drinking a caustic, carbonated substance that causes his intestines to explode.  For her trouble, Carol gets impaled in the very same shower in which she'd humiliated Marty during the prologue.  Since this is an April Fool's Day-themed film there is, of course, a twist ending, but it is at best pretty stupid and, at worst, totally nonsensical.

Slaughter High is, ultimately, a pretty minor entry in the slasher canon, and I can't for the life of me figure out why it took three goddamn people to write and direct it!  Munro gives the only decent performance, but even she is strictly phoning it in.  The abandoned school setting provides some slightly unnerving atmosphere, but it's almost totally undone by clumsy direction and too-dark cinematography (there are several scenes in which it's nearly impossible to tell what's going on).  The film's biggest saving grace is that it's one of the few slasher films to provide a wholly sympathetic killer; Munro and her friends are all unrepentant sociopaths who show no remorse/admit no guilt for their part in destroying the life of their former classmate.  Slaughter High was shot under the working title of April Fool's Day, but was changed to avoid confusion when a (superior) film was released using the same title that year.