By Geno McGahee
In the 1980s, the slasher film was the sub-genre of horror that was ruling the box office. FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980), SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983), THE BURNING (1981), THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982), PROM NIGHT (1980), MY BLOODY VALENTINE (1981), HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (1981) and THE PROWLER (1981) are just a small sampling of the movies that the horror fans were getting treated to. The kids nowadays don’t know what they are missing. This was the time for horror and maybe the slashers will come back and rule again…let’s hope so.
So, to capitalize on the slasher craze, we get the 1986 film “SLAUGHTER HIGH.” It has a good title and a familiar formula of a revenge killer wearing a mask and murdering those that did him wrong. Written and directed by George Dugdale, a novice to film and it shows. His film career consists of two movies with this one being the most notable, but he was smart to get out of the game. Although he followed the formula, this film was an empty shell of a slasher film.
Marty (Simon Scuddamore) is a nerd that is being played by a group of jerks. He gets led to the shower room by the hot chick, Carol (Caroline Munro), for some loving, but it’s a setup. When he gets naked and opens the shower curtain, he sees a crowd videotaping him and screaming “where’s the beef?” Two dudes then grab him and flip him upside down and start dunking his head into the toilet, but it was sort of odd. As they lifted him up, Marty’s ass was being shoved right into their faces. I’m not sure what’s worse, getting your head dipped into a toilet or getting Marty’s ass plunged into your face over and over. These bullies didn’t think this out too much.
The coach comes in and breaks it up and decides to punish the teens that did the prank and now they’re steaming mad. They play another prank on Marty, but it leads to tragedy. He gets badly burned and disfigured and is never seen again. Ten years later, the group returns for a reunion in the run down school and things are immediately odd. Why a reunion in such a place? It was dark, dirty and in need of maintenance badly. No reunion would have taken place there but none of the characters seems to notice.
Marty returns in a jester mask and starts killing, starting with the poor groundskeeper. It’s bad enough that he still works there ten years later, but he saved Marty then and now, he gets killed? Marty should have let the poor guy go. Also, if he’s in charge of maintaining the school, he should have been fired. He was doing a terrible job.
Through a series of pranks, I guess, Marty easily snuffs a couple of his high school chums. He puts acid in a beer, causing a guy to rip open his stomach, which explodes and launches blood and guts over a girl. That girl takes a bath…in the school…and acid begins to come from the faucet and instead of getting out of the tub immediately, she just stays here and gets her skin boiled off as Marty watches on. The group tries to escape, but they are locked in and the windows have juice running through them. So, there is no escape. They must face Marty.
The focus of this film seems to be on the deaths. We had a couple electrocuted while having sex, the acid deaths, the axe through the head, and we even had the lead rip off his own face. Those sorts of things are usually icing on the cake, especially at this time, but there is no cake here…just fucking icing.
SLAUGHTER HIGH is a terrible movie. In 1978, CLASS REUNION MASSACRE was released and is such a better approach to this sort of topic and it may have inspired this movie. They are rather similar, but SLAUGHTER HIGH is poorly written and structured. It’s an empty film without any character development and it doesn’t know what it wants to be. At times, I think it’s a spoof and at times, I think that it wants to be a serious slasher. In the end, none of it works and this film becomes an insult to the slasher films of the 80s.
Rating: 1.5/10 – OK, I laughed when they said where’s the beef.
