Excellent but underrated film

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Despite all the bad acting and dumb decisions by the actors, somehow I sat thru this. I mean, who goes to a school closed down (funny how none of the alumni had any clue their high school has been closed for 5 years), shocked that the school is closed and still party. Here are some classic bad decisions: Guy tears out his stomach, it explodes spraying a woman in blood. The rest, as they should, freak out and try to get out of the school. Not the woman who got sprayed in blood. She not only has to wash off the blood, she has to strip down and take a bath to wash off all the blood. The sink just wouldn't do. Guess what happened to her.A number of people have already been murdered and they know about it. But yet 2 people just can't resist each other and have to have sex. They are so loud, everybody hears it. I've heard of strong sex drives, but this is ridiculous. Wasn't too hard for the killer to find them.Then you have the mechanic. He can fix the tractor so they can get out of the school (no one is strong enough to break a window). So rather than everyone stay together while he fixes it, lets leave him alone so the killer can do his thing. Again, they know a killer is in the school.The killer just killed everybody I know, so when I knock him down with a baseball bat, I'll just drop the bat and run. Oh yeah, I'm lucky enough to knock the killer down again, but this time I'll leave him a better weapon, a javelin. You think she made it? Constantly, people going off on their own, rather than staying in a group. Plus the killer wears a jester mask that has bells on it. Yet he can constantly sneak up on people without them hearing him.I could go on and on. The one thing this movie got right was the casting of the nerd. Its unfortunate that his life was cut short in real life.This is definitely a movie you need to watch with a few beers in you. The movie will make you feel like a genius.

Another high-school-prank-gone-wrong-disfigured-victim-seeks-revenge slasher movie from the 1980s. If you can put up with a horribly amateurish first half hour, this one has a few decent moments and a couple of fairly gruesome and imaginative kills. It also has instances of head-slapping stupidity, such as Caroline Munro knocking down the killer with a baseball bat and then dropping it beside him and running away (!), of the fact that all the characters can quite easily leave the school building as one of them demonstrates but never even try to. Speaking of Munro, she is surprisingly convincing playing a teenager despite being 37 (!) at the time, but this was a big career comedown for her - she was in a James Bond movie less than a decade earlier, for crying out loud. One amusing line: "if a caretaker takes care of the place, a janitor....janits?" ** out of 4,.

Routine '80s slasher about a group of people gathering for a high school reunion and being killed off one by one. This is one of many slashers with the same premise: nerdy outcast is bullied and usually disfigured by assholes but comes back years later for revenge. The only "star" in the movie is Caroline Munro. She was 36 at the time, which makes her playing a teenager in early scenes a hoot. The production's pretty cheap but I do enjoy the location shooting, one of the primary selling points of '70s & '80s slasher films. The score is by Harry Manfredini of Friday the 13th fame. He reuses some of that memorable score here. But the best part of his new score is this Sanford & Son-ish bit of music that seems more at home in a comedy than a horror movie. It gives the movie an extra bit of quirkiness that I liked. There's also a comically bad heavy metal theme song. It's not a terrible movie of its type but very predictable. It helps that it doesn't take itself seriously.

Slaughter High was the only slasher movie I saw growing up. It was harmless fun for the most part, but had one death scene that really bothered me. In recent years, I've become more interested in horror movies, so when I came across a good copy of Slaughter High, I decided it was time to revisit it to see how it held up.The story is about a nerd who gets painfully disfigured when a group of popular kids keep picking on him. He gets them back years later by trapping them in the school and killing them off.Watching it today was almost like watching it for the first time, since I didn't remember much of it. My verdict: it holds up just fine. It moves along at a decent pace and does what these movies do fairly well. The scene I remembered most vividly--the shower scene--is still pretty disturbing. It ends satisfyingly enough, and kept me entertained throughout.