Slaughter High

Slaughter High was released as part of LionsGate's Lost Collection, boasting the dubious subtitle, "the best movies you totally forgot about."  Odds are, most people have never seen this one, but somehow Slaughter High gained itself a nice little cult following over the years, and someone borrowed a fan's old VHS copy, transferred it to DVD, and released it to the masses.

Slaughter High was released during the slasher frenzy of the 1980's, and it has all the ingredients for a cheesy, low-budget slasher.  There's a token black character who's the first to die, actors who are far too old to be playing high school students (I think the youngest was 29), gratuitous nudity, a masked killer, a high school prank gone awry, and an insane amount of plot holes (including a mind-boggling twist-within-a-twist ending).

It's April Fool's Day, and nerd Marty (Simon Scuddamore) is about to get it on with the sexy, popular Carol (Caroline Munro).  Of course, it turns out this is nothing more than a setup for the cool "kids" to get Marty naked, hose him down, dunk his nude body in the toilet, and capture the events on film, until the coach shows up to drag the bullies off to detention in the school gym.  Unfortunately, the gang plays one final prank on Marty, one which culminates in Marty being splashed with nitric acid and horribly burned.

Now, it's some time later (the film never says how much later, but the trailer reveals it's five years, though the actors look the same age they did in high school: OLD).  They've been invited to their high school reunion.  Never mind the fact that the only attendees are those who bullied Marty.  And the fact that the school's locked, run-down, and abandoned doesn't raise any red flags.  The group, after sitting for hours on the grass outside the building, decides to break into the school, where they start getting picked off one by one by a killer in a jester costume.

Has Marty returned to seek payback?  Or is someone else to blame?  Is it all an April Fool's Day prank?  How is the killer able to predict when and where his intended victim will be, and stage elaborate traps for them?  When more than one victim is in more than one designated death area, how does the killer manage to be in both places at the same time?

Most, if not all, of these questions will remain unanswered.  Slaughter High is definitely a leave-your-brain-at-the-door kind of experience.  Plot holes and inconsistencies abound, with even the setting being questionable.  What high school includes lounge areas, bathtubs, garages, and beds, yet has no lockers or classrooms?  The acting is always bad, sometimes hilariously so.  Perhaps some of the actors were speaking so slowly and awkwardly in an attempt to hide their British accents, which crept through more often than not.  I don't think he was trying to hide an accent, but the best moment is provided by one guy who falls off his bike (a gleefully awful bit of acting there, as the actor throws himself to the ground), then delivers the line, "Man, that. bike. has. to. go.", with slow, deliberate pauses between each word, as if he has no idea what word will come out of his mouth next.  It's that bad.

One good thing I can say is the death scenes are actually reasonably memorable.  The low-budget effects include a gut-busting explosion, a mid-coitus electrocution, and some other cool stuff I don't want to spoil.  Unfortunately, the film's low budget is also apparent in its DVD transfer.  I wasn't kidding when I said it looks like someone copied it from a VHS.  The audio quality suffers as well; I watched it with the subtitles (surprisingly, there are English or Spanish subtitles, a rarity when it comes to low-budget slasher DVDs).  It's not a huge deal, though; Slaughter High is not one you're going to want to watch on your wall-size HDTV anyway.

I simply must mention the soundtrack.  The score was done by Harry Manfredini, so there's a nod to Friday the 13th, complete with the distinctive "Ki-ki-ha-ha" sound.  I don't know if Manfredini was responsible for the theme song of sorts, a hair-metal/synth-pop hybrid with some nut cackling madly and screaming, "April Fool's Day!", but, if so, I must thank him for the hearty laugh I got out of that one.  Even better, it begins and ends the movie, in addition to playing at different points throughout.

Slaughter High is an absolute mess, but it's so bad it's almost good.  Those who are entertained by bad movies should definitely get a kick out of it.  I enjoyed it because of (not in spite of) its flaws.  Die-hard (and I mean die-hard) slasher fans could certainly do worse than this one.  It's hard to call Slaughter High "the best" anything, but, to a certain audience, it's entertaining in its ineptness.