January 13th, 2005

In the World of horror movies there's few places you definitely don't want to be. There's summer camp (we all know how that turns out), the wilderness (Davey Crockett isn't the only "King of the wild frontier"), and the topic of this grab bag - school.

Seems you just can't get an education in horror movies without being sliced-up by some sort of deranged misfit who usually is holding a grudge because they were picked-on when they were younger. Or perhaps they just didn't get into Harvard, who knows? What we do know is that once you go to school in a horror flick, you're as good as dead.

Now to shine the light on three slasher movies that get a failing grade...

Graduation Day [1981] might be a curiosity to many simply because the cast features both Scream Queen favourite Linnea Quigley and Vanna White of letter turning fame on Wheel Of Fortune. But it's there that your curiosity should stop as you'll end-up being treated to one of the poorest school slashers around.

Things are going great for Laura, the track team star. That is until she drops dead after winning a race. Soon enough the rest of the team is getting knocked-off one-by-one by a masked killer in some of the most ridiculous ways ever seen in a horror movie. That's right someone is killed by a football with a javelin attached, another dies after pole vaulting into a mat of spikes - yeah it doesn't get much worse than this one folks. This even manages to make our other two movies here look good.

Splatter University [1983] was the first directing effort for Richard W. Haines, a guy who will forever live in the hearts of B-movie fans everywhere for co-directing the first Class Of Nuke 'Em High movie for Troma.

But here there's absolutely no talent evident (not that Nuke 'Em needed much) as Haines keeps his camera in focus and not much else for this pretty dull piece of slasher junk as the students at a local college start getting killed-off by an unknown killer (though, thanks to the prologue, we're to assume it's the escaped wacko who knifed an orderly in the groin). Of course this leads to a handful of relatively bloodless deaths and most of them just have a knife (which Haines likes to have come at the camera a bunch of times) being stabbed into a victim and pulled upwards. Yeah, about as inspired as the rest of the movie.

And what kind of slasher movie is this when it doesn't even have any nudity?!

Cutting Class [1988] is another junker that's really only known because it happens to be the film debut of future "People's Sexiest Man Alive" Brad Pitt.

Otherwise it's a wannabe tongue-in-cheek effort that has the students at a local high school being killed off and Donovan Leitch (who just happened to recently be released from a asylum) being blamed for the deaths. There's also a whole bunch of mediocre deaths, a lame "power tool" brawl finale, and (like Splatter University) no nudity!

I guess the reason Cutting Class, and the others mentioned here, fail is because they can't even get the basic rules of being a slasher movie right. Those rules that say we need a lot of deaths (one every 7-10 minutes preferably) and at least a little bit of skin.