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| Courtesy of Arrow Films |
Following the death of late teen actor Christopher Stryker
who joins Malcolm McDowell and Michael Gothard as one of the more formidable
young horror heavies in cinema history, the film released under the alternate
title Raging Fury in some circles is a startlingly offbeat and
unsettling mixture of juvenile delinquency, rape revenge and spiritual possession. Though it doesn’t break the mold it does
however mix up subgenres you wouldn’t expect to see go together, least of all
in this manner.
Zeroing in on high school football hero Jon-Jon (Christopher
Cousins) who after quitting the team falls in with the wrong crowd, mingling
with a sadistic gang led by Dickens (Stryker), Hell High follows the riff
raff to the home of their teacher Miss Storm (Maureen Mooney) whom they intend
to prank and terrorize. Unbeknownst to them (glimpsed in flashback), their teacher harbors something of a checkered past.
In the efforts
to initiate Jon-Jon into the gang, the youths disguised by face masks proceed
to harass Miss Storm before invading her home too, sending her into a nervous breakdown
before Dickens decides to take his transgressions against his schoolteacher
even further. In so doing however,
something is awakened in Miss Storm that transforms the meek and vulnerable
woman into a blade wielding maniac thirsty to spill the blood of her invading
pupils.
A bit of a slow burn that starts out like A Clockwork
Orange or The Last House on the Left as a harrowing home invasion
with threats of sexual assault in the air before abruptly flipping the switch
into a Michael Myers killing machine by way of Carpenter’s Halloween, it
is easy to see why Grossman’s one and done time in the director’s chair was
difficult to categorize or title.
Despite having identifiable subgenres on display you can pinpoint to
other movies, they go together in such a way here that is genuinely strange
when it isn’t being downright cruel.
The strangeness comes mostly from the age demographic of the
‘high-school’ students who look more like they drove off of the fraternity in National
Lampoon’s Animal House over to the cemetery with the punks dancing on
headstones in The Return of the Living Dead. For being in grade school these kids look
like they belong in college. Anyway, proper
age demographic or not, the film’s sense of danger and menace exudes entirely
from Christopher Stryker who tragically had a very short-lived acting
career. With only Eddie and the
Cruisers to his acting credit until then, Stryker comes off as a completely
unhinged sociopath in Hell High who you can believe in actually
committing a crime, he’s that good. A
real shame his life was cut short as he’s positively electric onscreen in this.
Everyone else mostly serves up the youth gang stereotypes
well from the punk girl to the dumb fat guy and special props go to Maureen
Mooney who is tasked with being harassed, disrobed and fondled while unconscious
before reawakening as a bug-eyed fanged murderess. While the innocent waif turned hardened
avenger trope is nothing new, how it plays out here is nevertheless something
we haven’t quite seen before, almost like something either natural or
supernatural snapped within this woman.
Visually the film is handsomely composed by eventual Secretary
cinematographer Steven Fierberg and the score by composers Chris Hyams-Hart
and Rich Macar gets the job done in terms of dialing up the notes of dread and
unease. Still, this tale of a good guy
dragged in with the wrong crowd only to find himself in a nightmare worse than
death mostly winds up being a show stealer for Christopher Stryker who nearly
walks away with the film all by himself.
Fans of the standard revenge slasher film will get some enjoyment out of
it while fans of the harrowing home invasion thriller will get more than their
fair share of the uncomfortable and squirm-inducing exploits of a then-emerging
new acting talent whose chance to shine ended too soon.
--Andrew Kotwicki
