MURDER LEGENDRE

Ahhhhhh Slaughter High, a slasher flick through and through! This is a flick that really took me back. Here is the setup, Marty ( Simon Scuddamore) is a high school kid that has no luck. His nerdy appearance makes him an easy target for a group of popular teens at Doddsville County High. One April Fool’s day, brunette bombshell Carol (Caroline Munro) comes onto Marty in the girls locker room. Marty of course falls for it, but soon finds himself naked in front of his tormentors as they video tape and chant “Where’s the beef?” and dunk him head first into the toilet. The torment doesn’t stop there, later they give him a spiked joint in which he smokes and then leads to a horrible accident in which the school lab goes up in flames, leaving Marty severely burned.

Ten years later, invitations are sent out for a high school reunion with everyone to meet at the old school, the only thing is, the ones who use to pick on Marty are the only ones invited. After waiting around too long for others to arrive, the restless group breaks into their old abandoned school where they party and reminisce about their glory years. It doesn’t take long for them to realize that they are not alone and it was no coincidence that only they were invited. Soon, they begin to drop one by one at the hands of a vengeful Marty.

Slaughter High is a vastly over looked film but not for good reason: I remember this being hard to track down actually. Well, amazon.com aside, it still kinda is. With inventive kills like the one I call the “beer drinking gut burst” or the “electrocuting orgasm bed” and with a decent amount of gore for it‘s time, this film could find a whole new audience if re-released today. It may be a tad too slow at times and the ending is sure to leave you with more questions than answers, but the fun factor never fades, making this flick worth your time!

The past couple of weeks I have taken it upon my self to watch an absurd amount of slasher flicks. I will be posting a couple of noteworthy ones here in the next couple of days.  But to start it off, I want to mention this lost classic I found call Initiation. This film really does take in every aspect of a classic slasher flick.

Take a central female character (Daphne Zuniga) with a dark and mysterious past, put her in a college with a load of fellow sex-starved students and then take those students and lock them in a shopping mall for the night with a madman on the loose. That’s pretty much the scenario of this film, if you’re looking for something more profound then you’re in the wrong genre. What you have here, to cut it down to basics, is lots of teens having sex, goofing around and getting slayed one-by-one. There are better examples of the genre, but this is enjoyable. There’s really nothing new here, but the ending caught me out, I have to admit. I really hadn’t figured that one out, not that I’m going to give anything away, you’ll just have to find out for yourself!

Oh, there’s plenty of gratuitous nudity, bad dialogue and reasonable gore (though not excessive) to keep most trash fans happy. Though watching this flick will only make you appreciate the other classics even more. It is pretty hard to find on the dvd shelfs now a days, but if you do manage to see a copy. It’s worth the five dollar pick up.