Saturday, November 17, 2012

Slaughter High (1986)

... aka: April Fool's Day
... aka: Jolly Killer

Directed by:
George Dugdale
Mark Ezra
Peter Litten

It's April 1st at Doddsville County High School. School nerd Marty Rantzen (Simon Scuddamore) thinks he's lucked out when beauty Carol Manning (Caroline Munro) comes on to him and wants to have sex in the girl's locker room. But the joke's on Marty. After undressing, he pulls back the shower curtain to reveal a bunch of his classmates standing before him holding camera equipment and laughing. April Fool's! After shocking him with a car battery and dunking his head in the toilet a few times, the drill sergeant-esque gym coach (Marc Smith) walks in on the prank and decides to punish all involved with detention. To add insult to injury, some of the guys decide to get back at Marty by giving him a tainted joint that makes him sick, and screw around with some chemicals in the science lab, leading to a fire. A large, unsecured jar of nitric acid sitting high up on a shelf (in a high school science lab?) manages to fall, splashes Marty in the face and causes an explosion. He manages to survive the incident, but half of his face is now disfigured. Needless to say, he develops quite the grudge in the process.

Five years pass and everyone has gone on with their lives. Invitations arrive for their high school reunion. Carol is doing well as a model and actress and decides to pass on starring in a sleazy movie (producer Dick Randall cameos as her shady agent) to go to it. Dumb meathead Joey (Gary Martin) and his ditsy flame Stella (Donna Yaeger) have gotten hitched. Skip (Carmine Iannaccone) is riding around in an old jalopy, so apparently he's not doing too well. Nancy (Kelly Baker) has decided to hitchhike her way there. "Bad boy" Frank (Billy Hartman) shows up riding a motorcycle and wanting a beer. The even-less-defined Ted (Michael Saffran), Shirley (Josephine Scandi), Susan (Sally Cross) and Carl (John Segal) round out the group. Once everyone arrives they realize that Doddsville High has long ago closed and now sits in an overgrown field. They fail to notice that the only people to show up from their graduating class are the ones involved in pranking Marty years earlier. They also fail to realize that the reunion falls on the same exact day - April Fool's Day (which was the shooting title) - Marty was injured.

Night falls, a thunderstorm begins and everyone is forced inside the condemned building. They eventually come across a room all decked out for a party. There's plenty of food and drink and everyone's locker has been moved into the room and are stocked with belongings of theirs that turned up missing during their high school years. The only other locker in the room is Marty's. Inside is a rat and a yearbook he never got to collect because he was too busy going through months of plastic surgery and unsuccessful skin grafts. No one seems overly concerned about any of this, at least not enough to stop sucking down beer, smoking weed and snorting coke. To no one's surprise but their own, they've all been lured there by the physically and mentally scarred former nerd (decked out in a jester mask / costume) so that he can finally get his revenge. The school's janitor Digby (Jon Clark), now the caretaker, is around just long enough to become the first victim. Hey, he's the sole black dude in the cast, after all!

One guy drinks a toxic beer, his guts start spilling out and his stomach explodes, sending everyone heading for the exit as quickly as possible. Well, everyone except for a woman who gets sprayed with blood and decides to head for the shower room to clean up (!) instead. She's rewarded for her boneheaded action by melting down in an acid bath. Electrical wiring has been placed over the windows and doors to prevent anyone from escaping. The one guy who does manage to get out is impaled with a steel pole through the back of a car seat. A man working on fixing a tractor / lawn mower is chopped up when the thing gets dropped on him. Another couple decide to ease the tension by having sex and get electrified on some wired bedsprings. A head is impaled on a hook, a hand is nailed to the wall, arms are sliced with a pocket knife and there's an impalement, a hanging and a drowning in sewage.

As dumb as much of this is (knowing there's a killer in the same building, I have a hard time believing one person could just fall asleep, let along three people!), as bad as some of the acting is, as unbelievable as a cast of 30 / 40 year olds playing high school students is and as unoriginal as the premise is, this is actually one of the better 80s slasher flicks in my humble opinion. For starters, there's plenty of blood and gore on display, a nice variety of kills and some of the deaths are fairly creative. Add a little sex and nudity, a decent setting and some surprisingly funny dialogue and you've got one of the more entertaining films in this subgenre. Much of Harry Manfredini's score sounds exactly like his FRIDAY THE 13TH soundtrack. There's even a hockey mask Jason joke included.

Held back for release for a little while (it was filmed in 1984 and has a 1985 copyright date), this was filmed as April Fool's Day; a title that eventually had to be changed to avoid confusion with the American slasher "parody" of the same name. Both were released in 1986.


Flesh-Eating Mothers (1988)

... aka: Flesheating Mothers
... aka: Flesh Eating Mothers

Directed by:
James Aviles Martin

The opening credits scour over a cartoon drawings of your typical neighborhood while a wonderfully hokey song called "Suburbia" plays out. When we cut to the film, the filmmakers do the exact same thing. We get to visit the homes of the residents of a peaceful, "happy" and safe suburban neighborhood, where it seems like most of the populace has their issues. Teenage delinquent Rinaldi (Neal Rosen) has been suspended from school yet again and his ma Rita (Suzanne Ehrlich) is afraid he's going to end up just like his father in the state penitentiary. Police officer Clyde McCormick (Mickey Ross) has lost custody of his young son to his drunken, obnoxious wife (Marie Michaels), who's only interested in getting her child support check and then showing him the door. Mrs. Nathan (Grace Gawthrop) is married to an alcoholic meathead who beats on her and threatens to kill her if she leaves him. And married man Roddy Douglas (Louis Homyak) has been spreading joy, comfort and, as we'll soon see, something else, all around the neighborhood. An avid jogger - hilariously clad in a "Hands Across America" t-shirt - Roddy has been screwing half of the town's women; single mothers and unhappy or bored married women alike, unbeknownst to his stay-at-home wife Sylvia (Katherine Mayfield).

Of course, there are some teens swept up in this mess. Aside from Rinaldi, there's Linda (Donatella Hecht), the daughter of Roddy and Sylvia, Jeff (Robert Lee Oliver), the son of the abused woman, and Joyce (Valorie Hubbard) and Timmy (Terry Hayes), who both come from broken homes. The mothers of all of the above - as well as Officer McCormick's wife and some other ladies in town - have all been sleeping with Roddy and each one starts behaving rather strangely. Thanks to contracting a brand new sexually-transmitted virus, the women begin to have an insatiable appetite... and it cannot be satiated with normal everyday food. That's because they now hunger for human flesh. The women also mutate and begin looking more monstrous, gain super strength and one even bites through a steel chain. McCormick stumbles in on his wife gnawing on his little boy's hand, shoots her a half-dozen times and finally puts her out with a bullet to the brain. The other cops don't believe his story so he's forced to go on the lam and goes to county coroner Dr. Lee Grouty (Michael Feuer) for help. Similar incidents start happening all around the neighborhood.

Linda stumbles in on her mother chowing down on her baby brother and then catches her dad and one of his many lovers getting frisky at a bar. Not knowing where to turn, and knowing the police aren't going to believe her, she agrees to meet with Jeff (who's sick of dealing with his abusive father) later. During one of the most memorable scenes, Rinaldi's mother goes into a passionate speech about how veal is made before biting a chunk out of her son's head. Timmy's mother kills his brother, Jeff's mother kills his father and Joyce's mother embarrasses her in front of her date at the "Women's Club Coalition" dinner when she starts feasting on the guests. Feeling responsible for their mother's actions, the teenagers decide to stick around and try to do something about it. The corrupt police commissioner (Ken Eaton) wants to cover up everything because he had killed his infected wife (who ate his arm) and tried to pass it off as a hunting accident earlier. Meanwhile, Dr. Grouty and nurse Felicia Codd (Carolyn Gratsch) manage to isolate the virus and try to come up with a possible antidote.

I've always kind of liked this one and have fond memories watching it late at night of the USA Network as a kid. It's a very low-budget and very uneven horror-comedy, but there's something strangely charming about the whole thing. Even the bad amateur actors (especially the guy playing the coroner, who pronounces his lines in one of the strangest ways imaginable) start to grow on you after awhile. Some of this is actually very funny, too, and there are plenty of weird-looking skin-ripping gore effects. The cannibal mutant moms bite chunks out of flesh, rip off arms and faces and, while dumpster diving, even pull a cat into two pieces. They also stroll around the neighborhood worrying that they've left their iron on at home and go window shopping in between cannibalizing victims. Some of the suburban satire is pretty good here and there are some amusing one-liners. FEM even has some intentional parallels to the AIDS crisis (with the insane commissioner going on a rant about how this is God's punishment for infidelity) but no one is going to be taking this one all that seriously.

Filmed in Upstate New York over a four week period by one of the writers of I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE (1986). Aside from a healthy cable run, it was issued on VHS by Academy and has been also been released on DVD by Elite Entertainment.

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