Spoofs of movies are always risky business. After the success of 1980's Airplane! there has been an abundance of parodies packed with mile-a-minute jokes and irreverent humour, but most of them haven't been that good, even the sequel to the trendsetter (aptly titled, Airplane II: The Sequel) was nothing more than a rehash. Meant to make light of the, at the time, burgeoning popularity of slasher movies, Student Bodies actually kicks off on the right foot with writer-director Mickey Rose hitting on a lot of the clichés, already established even this early in the sub-genres short reign, but just can't keep it up when Rose decides he'd rather try to get most of his humour from playing on the "murder mystery" devices where he trots a slew of wacky characters out and everyone, or anyone, could be the killer - or at least a red herring.

It opens with your typical horror movie scene as a teenage girl home alone finds herself stalked by a killer. The only difference here being that our killer has quite the a heavy-breathing problem, all the obvious clichés are pointed out for us (like the arrow pointing to the door to let us know it's unlocked), and our murderer gets stuck on bubblegum going up the stairs and has a penchant for wacky weapons. Oh, and there's also a running body count tally to keep track of the deaths for us.

Our victim was a student at Lamab High where a string of student deaths have started to get out of hand. Kristen Riter plays Toby, the virginal girl who's set out to try and figure out who's doing the killings. Could it be the gangly, dumb janitor? The shop teacher that's obsessed with horse head bookends? The guidance counsellor who does things backwards all the time? No one on the faculty is safe from Toby's Nancy Drew detective work. At the same time our killer, dubbed "The Breather", is going around campus knocking off any teenagers who are being promiscuous using such weapons as a paper clip, the aforementioned bookends, and trash bags.

Student Bodies keeps the jokes flying constantly without mercy, the only problem is that a good seventy-percent of them tend to fall flat. I did get some chuckles from a brief intermission where one of the film's producers goes on a spiel about how they are going to get an R-rating (that ends with one of the movies few profanities, and actually succeeded despite it being a joke) and a good portion of them in the first third work fairly well but Rose loses track of the satire, the killer's jokes eventually get annoying, and there's a lot of awkward attempts at humour that just flounder - like Toby's first visit to the school psychologist. Rose spends way too much time with his red herrings and not nearly enough time picking apart slasher conventions like he did in the first fifteen minutes.

The entire movie feels scattershot and it's most obvious during the finale where things take a bizarre turn into surrealism with Toby being chased and having various hallucinations. There's even a wink to Carrie to top it all off. This makes me wonder just how troubled the production was. Originally funded due to a writer's strike at the time, this was produced by veteran comedy director Michael Ritchie (Bad News Bears, Fletch), who took the "Allen Smithee" moniker probably to avoid union troubles, and it's said he also directed some of this, which either means they weren't happy with Rose's work and attempted to fix it, or the production was way too rushed for it to turn out any good.

This was a staple in my youth and while I was watching it brought me back some good memories of seeing it numerous times on late night television. I still found Riter's performance to be perfectly acceptable (and she looks cute when she dons a Grease-like disguise in the last third), got a handful of chuckles out of it, and was still amazed at the flexibility of our janitor character, Malvert (played by an actor billed merely as "The Stick"). But this definitely hasn't aged well and doesn't really deserve its cult following. I am happy to see it finally come out on DVD though, just so people with a long-standing curiousity about it can check it out, but that doesn't mean I'll ever watch it again. (Chris Hartley, 10/8/08)

Directed By: Mickey Rose.
Written By: Mickey Rose.

Starring: Kristen Riter, Matt Goldsby, Richard Brando, Joe Flood.

Picture Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: Legend continues to bring some of Paramount's obscure back catalogue to disc and Student Bodies if definitely one of the best looking of the bunch. For a movie closing in on thirty-years-old(?!), this looks pretty damn fine. There's some scattered specks but this looks way better then I ever imagined it could.

Extras: All that we get here is a trailer but it's an interesting one because it gives us a chance to see how they tried to market the film at the time - let's just say they failed.

Visit Legend Films for more info.