While Michael, Freddy, and Jason tend
to get most of the slasher love during the Halloween season, the
slasher boom of the 1980s produced so many genre entries that horror
fans willing to explore off the beaten path can find some really fun
lesser-seen titles with which to mix up their watch-list. While there
were an absolute ton of slasher flicks in the '80s (not all of which
were good, to put it mildly), a handful of lower-tier indie slashers
have floated to the top of the pack over the years as cult-classics
for various reasons; usually their gore, their strangeness, or both.
It's a list that includes the likes of Hell Night, The Mutilator,
The Boogeyman, The Slayer, and
1986's Slaughter High,
among others. A British-produced (though American-set) indie slasher
that (mostly) knew how to effectively work with a low budget,
Slaughter High has
earned a modest but faithful cult following over the years, for a few
reasons.
What
first drew audiences to the film in 1986 was that its marketing
billed it as “from the makers of Friday the 13th;”
instant slasher cred. This isn't really true, though: one of the
film's producers was an executive producer/financier on the original
Friday the 13th,
and Harry Manfredini composed the score, but that's where the shared
crew members end. However, the film is by the producers of Pieces,
and just as that film was their take on (IE, ripoff of) The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this is
their answer to Friday the 13th.
This in itself provides some intriguing credentials, and gets to the
other reason why Slaughter High
has become a minor cult classic over the years: two decades before it
was standard practice, this was one of just a few films in the VHS
era to be released by Vestron Video in both R-rated and unrated cuts,
and the unrated cut is VERY gory, and boasts some truly wild special
effects. This isn't all that Slaughter High
has to offer, though: the film also has a weird sense of humor that
makes it more fun, some great on-location atmosphere, and a totally
wild finale that goes to some really bizarre places. Sure, it also
has some significant shortcomings and may not be a great film (or
even a very good film) by most objective standards, but it is a very
fun slasher movie that is pretty ideal for Halloween-time movie
nights with friends who enjoy some gory 80s cheese.
The
tale begins with a high school's ruling clique of popular kids
brutally bullying awkward, hapless nerd Marty with a string of
mean-spirited pranks on April Fool's Day... but when one of the
pranks goes awry, Marty ends up horribly disfigured in a chemical
fire. Flash forward ten years, and the same clique have reunited for
their high school reunion (also on April Fool's Day, which should be
the first red flag) and returned to their old school, only to find it
long-ago boarded up and deserted; there is no reunion, and someone
has sent prank invitations exclusively to their group of friends.
They unwisely decide to break in to the school to explore and party
anyway, not stopping to think that this is almost certainly a revenge
plot by the guy whose life they ruined exactly ten years ago. This
set-up should clue you in to two of the bigger characterization
issues that Slaughter High struggles
to overcome (at least at first): unlike an I Know What You
Did Last Summer situation that
is clearly an honest accident, these characters are largely unlikable
bullies who don't give us much reason to care whether they live or
die, and they are also incredibly, incredibly dumb. They spend the
entire movie doing wildly ill-advised and unrealistic things that are
idiotic even by the generous standards of slasher movies, where
wandering off on your own or sneaking off to have sex while there's a
killer on the loose are normal behavior. They make Marty's job very
easy. Which is just as well, because the utter cruelty of their
bullying in the opening scenes sets this up not to be a movie where
we root for our protagonists to outwit the killer, but a movie where
we snack on popcorn while we wonder how these jerks are going to die.
The two main characters, played by Caroline Munro (Maniac,
The Spy Who Loved Me) and
Carmine Iannaccone, are the most likable, largely because they
deliver the strongest performances, but even so, between what awful
bullies they were and the blatantness with which they break every
rule of the slasher movie playbook to an extraordinary degree, they
basically have earned the nightmare they're finding themselves in.
Viewers without a taste for B-grade horror movies and a sense of
humor that likes to laugh at them may find the film dead in the water
as a result of this characterization; to be sure, the script is not
good (by writer Mark Ezra's own admission – he hammered it out in
less than three weeks, and really does not like the rushed and
half-baked results). Having a cast of characters we really don't care
about, and who are functionally just fodder for the gory effects
setpieces, certainly robs the film of some of the suspense it might
have if we cared more about the characters. But if you're here
primarily for the practical-effects-fueled slasher scenes, and you
like the sound of getting some cheesy-movie-loving friends together
(ideally with some alcoholic beverages) to laugh as would-be slasher
victims break the rules of the genre, then these may not be problems,
and may in fact be (semi-ironic) positives.
At any
rate, once Marty springs his trap and the horror starts, the film
finds its footing well enough as it can excel at what it's really
good at. Slaughter High gets
a lot of mileage out of two very strong points: a fantastic found
location, and great, genuinely gruesome special effects. The
production values certainly betray the film's low budget in other
ways – namely its flat, mediocre cinematography and lighting design
– but the film gets a massive boost in production values because of
the absolutely perfect location that they were able to find. The
movie is shot in an authentic long-abandoned school exactly like what
the script calls for, and it would take a lot of money to craft a
creepy, derelict building this good. The atmosphere is very strong
(even when it's in spite of, not enhanced by, the cinematography),
with the shell of a school itself taking on the feeling of a
character; it certainly has more personality than most of the leads,
and is at least as creepy as Marty and his jester mask. The flashback
scenes (presumably shot last) do a convincing job of cleaning up the
abandoned building and making it look like a functional, typical high
school, lending a stronger sense of eeriness to the bulk of the movie
when it is crumbling and dark. The location does more than any other
aspect of the film to set it apart from its countless '80s slasher
siblings.
Then
there's the matter of the gore effects, which are excellent, and
truly nasty and gruesome. The knowingly over-the-top April Fool's
conceit of the whole thing, and the shameless tropeyness of it all,
adds a certain tongue-in-cheek vibe, and means that it doesn't feel
as outright mean-spirited as some slashers like The
Mutilator and the first
Sleepaway Camp. But
even so, this is definitely one of the gorier slasher movies made
outside of Italy; it's no surprise that the MPAA hacked it up as much
as Marty hacks up his former bullies, and it's definitely a case
where the unrated director's cut contains enough extra effects work
to substantially change the experience of the film for the darker and
meaner. Marty was apparently quite the science nerd in high school,
and he uses his knowledge to engineer some unusually inventive and
unpleasant kills beyond the usual slashing; he even pulls out the
stops for an intestine-spewing gut explosion and a
stop-motion-animation body-melt that would make Lucio Fulci proud.
Once it kicks into gear, it does an admirable job of ramping up the
craziness, leading to a climax which is... pretty weird, in a very
entertaining way.
Tongue-in-cheek
and deliberately over-the-top in some moments, genuinely nasty in
others; in some ways cheap-looking and hampered by its low budget,
but in other ways packing some solid and memorable production
value... Slaughter High
is certainly a movie of inconsistencies, and it's most definitely
uneven. But at its best it's a lot of fun and quite effective in its
horror, and while it may not add up to a genuinely good movie,
there's enough to like that slasher fans should have a really good
time with it, especially in a group movie-party kind of setting. Its
reputation as a minor cult-classic is well-deserved, and certainly
hard-fought. The movie actually was shot under the title April Fool's
Day, but had to change its name when Paramount's April
Fool's Day, which started
production shortly thereafter, bought out the title for a large sum
of money (which didn't make it past the producers to the filmmakers,
who were none too happy that their heavily April Fool's Day-themed
film suddenly needed a new title when they got there first). It went
on to be a cult favorite of the video store era, but then went out of
print after Vestron Video closed their doors, and became a highly
sought-after rarity for most of the 1990s and 2000s, until it
belatedly made it to DVD (as a poor-quality VHS-to-DVD rip from
Lionsgate) in 2009. Fortunately the last decade has been more kind to
Slaughter High, with
the film first getting a very good UK special edition DVD from Arrow
Video a few years ago (oddly enough, with the original April
Fool's Day title card on their
restored widescreen print), and then Lionsgate giving it an excellent
US blu-ray upgrade through their Vestron Video Collector's Series
line in 2017. One could make a strong argument that Slaughter
High is better suited to April
Fool's Day viewing than Halloween, but for those looking for a
different '80s slasher than the ones we typically encounter this time
of year, this British answer to Friday the 13th
definitely makes a good (though not great) alternative.
-
Christopher S. Jordan
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