October 2013 Edition #9: SLAUGHTER HIGH

Director: Mark Ezra, Peter Litten & George Dugdale
Screenplay: Mark Ezra, Peter Litten & George Dugdale
Starring: Caroline Munro, Simon Scuddamore, Carmine Innacone, Gary Martin
Release Date: November 14th, 1986


Despite a lifetime spent obsessing over the minutiae of horror films from the 70’s and 80’s, I am a relative newcomer in my appreciation of the most influential sub-genre of that era, the slasher movie. The types of thrills I yearned for all dealt with some manner of the fantastic, be they werewolves, zombies, demons and giant mutated lizard-beasts. By comparison slasher films, to my fevered pre-adolescent mind, seemed fairly rote, far too grounded in reality to capture my imagination. Of course I grew up adoring John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN and the FRIDAY THE 13th franchise, but my love of Carpenter’s seminal film is no doubt rooted in it’s atmosphere-drenched evocation of my most cherished holiday. As for Jason, well, I started off the franchise with Part VI, so he was a zombie as far as I was concerned. No, it wasn’t until I entered my late teens that I stopped being bored by slashers, and started to appreciate the good ones when they came along. It certainly didn’t help that, being the cheapest films to produce, there are so many staggeringly awful entries in the genre. The slasher film, more than any other horror genre, operates by exploiting our most base human instincts. Young people have sex. Young people die. That simplicity in storytelling lends itself to the easy elicitation of reactions of horror, tittilation, disgust, and in some rare cases, pure adrenalized awesomeness. SLAUGHTER HIGH delivers all of the above in one severely brain damaged package.

Five years after pulling a prank that ended with class nitwit Marty Rantzen (Scuddamore) receiving acid burns over half of his face, the group of preppy bullies responsible are invited to a reunion at their old stomping grounds, Doddsville High. Stupidly ignoring that the place is abandoned, and also that only the seven of them have arrived, they break into the building and discover an old classroom full of party decorations and alcohol, along with all of their lockers adorned with items they lost in their high school days. Off to the side is Marty’s locker, looming over the party. And out in the school’s hallways, decked out in a jester mask, lurks Marty. You see, today is April Fool’s Day, and Marty would like to try out a few deadly pranks of his own.

This movie is dumb. Like, really dumb. Beyond retarded, pants-shittingly dumb. SLAUGHTER HIGH is, by all accounts, a tacky, embarrassing exercise in rampant idiocy. It is also a pitch-perfect parody of the genre, amplifying all of the ridiculousness, gratuity, and overall forehead-slapping stupidity perpetrated by other slasher films, and I loved every goddamn gloriously goofy moment of it!

From the moment the first credit appeared on screen, announcing that it took three directors to make this thing, I knew I was either going to be in for something very special, or a colossal waste of time. Fortunately that question was answered immediately, as the film’s ridiculous synth-heavy hair metal theme music kicked in, courtesy of the FRIDAY THE 13th series’ resident composer Harry Manfredini. The opening moments are straight out of THE TOXIC AVENGER, following a group of obnoxious jocks and their girlfriends while Carol lures Marty into the girls locker room with the promise of sex. This sequence goes on at least ten minutes longer than it needs to, extending into a second pranking involving tainted weed (Manfredini adds a hilariously “evil” guitar stinger to the score every time it’s mentioned) and a precariously placed bottle of nitric acid that the directors make sure to establish the hell out of, culminating in an explosion and a wicked melted face that acts a perfectly serviceable origin story for our madman.

Once the story jumps ahead five years the tone remains just as playfully over the top. With the exception of class beauty Carol (Munro), all of the characters are remorseless, vulgar, asinine caricatures, blustering morons who act as mere fodder for Marty’s increasingly inventive and ludicrous spree of murderous nocturnal activities. And that’s fine by me, as I had a blast watching these idiots get killed one by one. Marty’s hideous plot is finally revealed when one of the guys shotguns a can of beer that turns out to be full of acid, causing his intestinal tract to rupture and explode gloriously onto his friends. From this point on the film becomes an escalating exercise in wanton gratuitous violence and stupidity. One girl gets blood on her face and decides to wash it off by stripping completely nude and hopping into a conveniently-placed bathtub, only to get doused in a bath of nitric acid, complete with a jerky stop-motion meltdown of her face. Two others really make sparks fly when they sneak off amidst the chaos for an adulterous hookup on an electrified bed which Marty flips the switch on at the moment of climax, causing the guy to furiously hump the girl faster while the currents of electricity fry their innards. Another fantastic kill involves a running lawnmower being dropped on some unfortunate bastard’s chest. And of course we get the usual impalements and straight-up axes to the face. All of this carnage is rendered in gruesome, gloopy detail via some impressive makeup effects courtesy of co-director Peter Litten. SLAUGHTER HIGH is definitely a moist movie, delivering all of the plumes of plasma and gory viscera missing from the later FRIDAY THE 13th entries.

  Directorially, the trio of Ezra, Litten and Dugdale maintain a tight pace, never allowing the film to wander or dwell too long on unnecessary scenes. Not a moment goes by without a ridiculous line delivery, musical cue, or vicious murder. Despite the film’s jokey tone, the team manages to milk a fair amount of atmosphere out of the abandoned high school setting. Judging by the numerous lengthy Steadicam shots utilized in the awesome final chase scene I’m guessing that this flick was shot in an actual abandoned school, and the genuine creepiness and decay of that location definitely comes across in the film. I also appreciated the numerous nods to horror fans, including a poster for the truly awesome slasher epic PIECES hanging on the wall of Carol’s agent, and a scene in which a character scares Carol with a hockey mask, at which point Manfredini briefly samples his score from FRIDAY THE 13th. The PIECES cameo in particular stands out, signifying to me that these guys knew exactly what they were doing when they made this flick as goofy as it is. What I appreciated most was they way the trio managed to subvert my expectations, crafting a climax in which the villain actually prevails, only to transition into a garish EC comics-style  twist involving the resurrected corpses of Marty’s victim’s stalking him throughout the school. I’d call this the most unbelievable aspect of the flick, but then again this is the kind of movie where we are expected to buy Caroline Munro (then 36 years old) as an 18 year old high schooler.

After doing a little research I discovered that this was an entirely British production. I don’t know how I managed to not notice the accents while watching the flick. Maybe they were masked by the generally shitty acting. Regardless, it seems to me that SLAUGHTER HIGH is basically a British approximation of what they think American slasher films are all about, highlighting all of the most inane and absurd aspects of Western splatter fare to insanely comedic effect. The flick is a perfect distillation of everything I love and loathe about the slasher genre, and I cannot wait to share it’s lunacy with others.

My Rating:
8.5/10