Horror hindsight: “Slaughter High”

Dillon O'Connor, Staff Writer

“Slaughter High” is a 1980s horror b-movie, and it’s probably one of the worst I’ve seen.

The film centers around a group of students who bully and prank a nerd to dangerous extremes. They are later called back to their high school for a reunion, where they slowly start to realize that something is wrong as they start to get picked off one by one.

The names of the characters are irrelevant because they are all so unlikable and extremely stereotyped even by old horror movie standards. No one really sticks out as enjoyable.

The details to this simple plot make far less sense. The bullies essentially sexually assault the nerd on his birthday, April Fool’s Day, and when they are caught by a janitor and reported to the gym teacher, they are made to do a light workout as punishment.

They then decide it was the nerd’s fault that they were caught instead of their own incompetence and proceed to give him poisoned weed as prank to get him sick and away from his science experiment.

While the nerd is distracted, a bully sneaks into the lab and basically rigs the experiment to explode. He then returns to the gym and waits for prank to trigger.

The prank goes off lighting the nerd on fire and covering him in acid that was precariously teetering on the edge of a shelf. The bullies rush towards the lab in anticipation only to realized they brutalized their victim far beyond what they had expected.

Flash forward 10 or so years and the bullies are invited to a class reunion at their old school. This is where most logic is thrown out of the window.

When they arrive, they find the doors locked and they decide to sit outside and drink from midday to night. After all the time they only look for another entrance due to a storm.

This makes no sense as they all have ways to return to town. They are by no means stranded and still choose to stay in a creepy abandoned school.

They run into the janitor who is now the caretaker of the building, but he is quickly killed by the nerd after that meeting. This doesn’t add up as the janitor was the only one who tried to help the nerd.

In the building they find a room decorated for a party and just calmly start to drink and eat from the buffet. With no real warning or explanation one of the bullies’ stomach explodes after shotgunning a beer.

The group flees the room only leaving one person behind. The girl, who’s face was left covered in blood form the incident, chooses to bathe in an old bathtub and basically washes everything but her face.

The water somehow then turns to acid killing the girl. These kills sort of make sense as the killer was smart and has knowledge of chemicals, but that theme ends here.

The group discovers the body and then start to search for a way out of the building as all exits are locked.

Now armed with the knowledge that two of their friends are dead, some of the group opts to cheat on their spouses in the middle of the crisis. They are both electrocuted on a metal cot and are discovered shortly after.

To be honest, most of the kills were uninteresting or done better in other movies. Even the leader of the bullies gets a swift and basic death; taking an ax to the head.

The one kill that was a highlight of the movie was when a bully who was trying to repair a ride on lawnmower had it dropped on him. He catches it before it crushes him and attempts to bench press it to avoid being cut to pieces by the spinning blade to no avail.

While held up in a room, the remaining friends come up with some random rules as to how the killer is operating. Firstly, is that the killer only wants the man and woman who organized the prank that scarred him.

This is clearly false as many others have already been killed including the janitor who was basically unrelated. Secondly, now that they know the killer is the nerd, they think he will only kill on April Fool’s Day and if they wait until noon, they will be safe. Besides the fact that there is no evidence the killer will stop after noon, there is the simple fact that day doesn’t end at noon.

The end of the movie essentially sees the killer succeed in killing those who wronged him. He is then tormented by their ghosts before it tells us that it was all the nerd’s dream.

That’s already a terrible ending, but then we are told that the movie may be the nerd’s plan after he breaks out of his asylum and he dreams of exactly what will happen in the future.

All in all, “Slaughter High” is a mess that isn’t worth the time or money to watch seriously, however it may serve as a good punching bag for those who want to make fun of a film for movie night.