Three years ago, there was an incident at a mental asylum where one of the most dangerous inmates went missing. On the day this happened, there was a search of the building and though the other patients were no help, the staff didn’t do too well in tracking him down either, leaving the madman to stab one of the male nurses to death, stuff him in a closet, and steal his clothes as the perfect disguise to allow him to slip out of the place unnoticed. Now there has been another murder of a young tutor at this Catholic university, who was staying late in her classroom when she too was stabbed; the police believe there’s a connection, and her replacement, Julie Parker (Forbes Riley) has no idea…
Splatter University was one of those rather misbegotten little horror films that emerged in the slasher boom of the nineteen-eighties which had been filmed three years before its release, sitting on the shelf for so long for no other reason than it wasn’t long enough for a feature. Director Richard W. Haines returned to what he had shot a year later and filmed some newer footage to bulk it up which in its in no way sticking out like a sore thumb manner was edited in, allowing us far more insight into the lives of the students than you would really think necessary. Especially when in all-too-typical of its time those students were an obnoxious lot you didn’t particularly care about.
On the other hand, in contrast to their lame, would be humorous antics (which included an impromptu dance in a bar, more obvious padding), Julie was actually a far more appealing leading lady than the movie needed, as Riley (going by her original name of Francine Forbes) went above and beyond the call of duty with a performance that suggested a genuine talent was frankly being wasted on material unworthy of her. That judgement was unavoidable in light of what ultimately happened in the final scenes, but until we reached those we were compelled almost in spite ourselves to be invested in Julie’s dilemma, where she wonders if she should be hanging around there when people were getting killed off.
That said, there was a long gap between the first two murders and the resumption of mayhem in the second half of what may have been a short movie – under eighty minutes, all told – but tended to drag when Riley wasn’t brightening up the screen with her committed work. She would go on to a long career in television, most notably a series of infomercials that made her far more income than being a scream queen ever would, but you watch this and she became one of those actresses where you can ponder what if… what if she had appeared in better work at this stage in her filmography, for example? As for the director, you could argue he reached his potential with this and more or less settled on a plateau of quality.
At least Haines forged a career of his own, at Troma, whose Lloyd Kaufman offered advice on how to make Splatter University more marketable and eventually took him under his wing as Haines became one of his regular employees, most notably on Class of Nuke 'Em High. You could discern that Kaufman influence on the scenes with the students, that identifiably callous sense of humour he specialised in, which some viewers may have preferred to the business the original footage was taken up with such as the concerns over the legalisation of abortion. Mind you, if you were interested in what that student who was in trouble was going to do, even there your compassion would be thwarted when you saw what perhaps predictably Haines did to solve her problem, and there was a definite drive to shock the audience by the story’s treatment of the female characters, fair enough the killer is shown to be a religion-crazed woman hater, but there wasn’t much incidence of the director shown in a benevolent light either. Music (synths) by Christopher Burke.
