Any movie that has a killing and a shower scene in the first five minutes is fine by me and this one kept trucking along and ended up being a fun way to blow off an hour and a half. This movie is also distinct because it is the only Australian teen comedy/slasher movie that I have seen. Between the cheeseball music, barbed wire killing tool, and a variety of slightly off-kilter characters thrown together in a plot that could only exist in the 80's, there was rarely a dull moment.

Helen Thomson stars as Mary Huston, an innocent Texan with an Aussie accent who is at a boarding school down under. The school is run by the adulterous Virginia Sheffield (who was like Karen Black crossed with Lauren Hutton) and her weak and dominated husband Myles (who was like Vic Tayback from TV's Alice crossed with Peter Lorre). This pair alone was worth the price of admission. Shortly into the film, we are treated to our first murder when a couple is killed in the forest and their eyes are gouged out. After this initial death, the movie switches into teen comedy mode for about half an hour outlining a rivalry between the surfer dudes led by Kevin (Ian Williams) and the Winchester preps led by Scott (Christophe Broadway). In this time we see a fight with music that sounds like it was rejected from CHiPs as well as a school dance complete with a cock rock band called Vice providing the tunes. After this interlude, we are back in slasher film territory with the usual hi-jinks around the campus although not an extremely high body count.

This was one of those movies that was entertaining in it's absurdity. The portrayal of the headmistress and her hubby was the centerpiece of the film with everything else revolving around them. I found it a little strange how there wasn't a central young character for us to follow as Mary and Kevin were not developed enough (or in the plot enough) for us to connect with them properly. In fact the film kept drifting between a number of characters and did a lot of things for no reason. A good writer has a reason for everything in the film but sometimes this felt like an amalgamation of scenes thrown together for no apparent reason and with no resolution to things that are brought up as if to pay off later. It was almost like they started to make a teen comedy, didn't like where it was going, and quickly rewrote the script into a horror film. Case in point was the surfer versus preps rivalry in that it went absolutely nowhere and there was no purpose for it later in the film but they spent a half an hour on it in the first act. I have no idea why this was even in the script other than padding or was part of a script that had been rewritten. In most cases, this kind of writing would make me give a really bad review but because Mary was such a pleasure to look at and because the killer was such a freak (although revealed too early), it made for a good time.

I will warn you now, if you don't appreciate the joys of B-movies, you should not bother with this one. However, if you are one who can appreciate clever cops, a surfer stud, fist pumping rock and roll, nubile Aussie chicks, and a nun, you will probably dig this movie. There was no a great deal of gore but we got a co-ed's head-versus-desk murder that was pretty nasty. Director Alec Mills was camera operator on most of the Roger Moore-era Bond films and was cinematographer on the Timothy Dalton years as well as King Kong Lives. (Josh Pasnak, 10/31/05)

Directed By: Alec Mills.
Written By: Robert Brennan.

Starring: Leon Lissek, Christine Amor, Helen Thomson, Ian Williams.