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| Images courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome |
Writer-director Herb Freed isn’t exactly a household name in
terms of exploitation slasher filmmaking, but in 1981 which saw an avalanche of
horror movies dominating movie theaters including but not limited to Halloween
II and Friday the 13th Part 2 making figurative and
literal killings at the box office, leading to a microbudget horror entry from
Freed called Graduation Day.
Produced on a tiny budget of $250,000, the indie horror flick raked in
nearly $24 million in ticket sales, an enormous amount at the time for the
slasher subgenre.
Initially met with negative reception as per most gory
slasher horror films of the day, the film has since gone on to amass a cult
following among horror fans though for decades it was only available in shoddier
fullscreen VHS releases. Previously on a
discontinued Troma DVD from 2002, Graduation Day became, for a while,
increasingly hard for fans to locate a watchable copy of. That is until the good folks at Vinegar
Syndrome took it upon themselves to perform a new 4K digital restoration of the
editor Martin Jay Sadoff’s surviving 35mm answer print giving longtime fans and
new horrorphiles a chance to explore this most nasty little lean mean number.
When a high school track racer drops dead of cardiac arrest
mid-race, a mercurial fencing-mask wearing killer starts murdering the deceased
girl’s friends and teachers one by one days before their high school graduation
is set to commence. When the girl’s
older sister Anne (Patch Mackenzie), a US Navy officer, arrives in town to
posthumously celebrate her late sister’s graduation, more classmates begin
vanishing without a trace and suspicions are aroused about who the killer might
actually be. Could it be the deceased’s
tough and demanding coach George Michaels (B-horror stalwart Christopher
George)? Could it be her abusive boyfriend? Or could it potentially be Anne herself?
Co-starring Michael Pataki (Rocky IV), The Return
of the Living Dead horror starlet Linnea Quigley, Carmen Argenziano (The
Accused), Vanna White before Wheel of Fortune as well as a cameo
performance from the music band Felony at a high school dance party, Graduation
Day is considered to be one of the most important homegrown regional
slashers of its day. A film that
showcases all the expectations of the high school slasher subgenre that proved
to be a little engine that could at the box office, the film is best remembered
for being boycotted by critics to try and quell the film’s success, resulting
ultimately in the opposite intended effect.
Co-written by director Freed and Anne Marisse based on a
story by co-producer David Baughn, Graduation Day while not the best looking
or well shot slasher in the world (Daniel Yaruissi’s photography, even in 4K,
tends towards blurriness) nevertheless packs an axe-wielding punch that keeps
you guessing as its characters meet gruesome bloody ends. Seen years later while aspects of the film
definitely date it to 1981, particularly the attire and especially the disco-oriented
score by Arthur Kempel, Graduation Day while being an old-fashioned
regional slasher kind of functions as a time capsule of a bygone era when low
budget horror could only look and sound like this. Proof positive microbudget scary slasher
thrillers are still among the most profitable subgenres still thriving today.
--Andrew Kotwicki
