Some years ago at this high school there was a class nerd called Marty Rantzen (Simon Scuddamore) who finally thought he was going to get lucky - and with one of the most attractive girls in school too, Carol (Caroline Munro). She led him into the girls' changing room and invited him to step into the shower to undress while she did the same on the other side of the curtain, but what he didn't know was that she had let in her mean friends and they were ready with their video camera to film him as a prank. Yet the thing about pranks is, they can go too far...
Slaughter High was a low budget shocker created by a trio of British special effects artists, arriving well after the heyday of the slasher movie by which time all they could do was spin out what had become hoary old clichés in a few short years. Originality was not the strong point here, but neither was humour, which was a drawback since this was meant to be a comedy as well, but the fact remained while this was nasty enough to be a straightforward horror its sense of humour left a lot to be desired, and mainly took the form of some very broad playing by the cast, trying to work up some laughs where there were none.
Another drawback was that the British production had opted to go transatlantic to increase its chances of making it big in the American market, so the whole movie, while obviously shot in the United Kingdom - the first shot we see of the high school is blatantly an English country house - visibly strained to be regarded as American. Unless that was one of the jokes, as where there were few actual gags in the script the whole affair stuck so close to what had gone before in this genre, and did it so unsubtly, that the possibility of it being a parody was not to be dismissed. On the other hand, you could watch it none the wiser.
What happens to Marty is that those bullies don't leave him alone after dunking his head down the toilet while naked, but have to go too far in their hijinks and in the process take leave of their senses, setting up an explosion in the chemistry lab where Marty is working which results in acid drenching him and leaving him disfigured. Somehow the pranksters did not foresee this happening, and they never see him again after he's been carted off to hospital. It should be noted there was a tragic dimension to the Marty character in that Scuddamore committed suicide shortly after filming his role, leaving the film open to musing over whether it was this that drove him to it.
Whatever the truth of that, it does take the amusement, such as it was, out of watching what happens to him once you're aware of it, but then, after a while you realise there's nobody to sympathise with. At a reunion at the school in the present, the bullies are invited to reassemble but on arriving the place is mysteriously deserted apart from the janitor, and so they find themselves locked in and someone (guess who?) bumping them off. At least in these latter scenes the cast look closer to their characters' ages, because they certainly didn't convince as teenagers (Munro was in her mid-thirties!), but they don't pitch their performances any lower, leaving it looking as if the directors were executing living cartoons with gusto. Really it's the deaths that they were most interested in so they get the most attention: Slaughter High could have been a fairly gruesome horror if presented sans humour, but as it is it simply seems silly. Music by Harry Manfredi.
[This may be a terminally tacky movie, but Arrow have pushed the boat out for the UK DVD, with two commentaries and a couple of featurettes as extras.]
