This isn't Marty McFly we're talking about...

Further thoughts of the film

•  I seem to complain about the Manfredini score, but with it so identifiable to the decade that is the 80s, it seems fitting for a slasher film like Slaughter High. When Caroline Munroe spends forever running from Mary throughout the whole damn school (the director gets a ton of mileage out of the location, as there isn’t a room, stairwell, or hall she doesn’t run through, down, or into), the score seems to fit it like a glove because every Friday the 13^th film has it.

• You know how characters make stupid decisions, and we always complain about it towards the screen. Munroe makes two critical doofus decisions that left me aghast. She has a bat, right? She takes a good two or three swings and drops the fucking bat right at his legs, walking away! And then, when Marty pursues her again, she has a javelin in her possession, and instead of using that to make sure he’s good and dead, she drops it down to him from a floor above!

• Dream logic is often used in horror films. I couldn’t help but recall Student Bodies (1981), of all movies, when the ending took place. So Marty gets his revenge, but before the guy could even properly celebrate, the ghoulish spirits of those he killed throughout the film rise from a foggy mist in the “class reunion” room to further haunt him.

• Dream logic can get you off the hook when there’s the viewer accusation of “bungled continuity”. When the killer can be so many places and do so much while those he kills have no prayer of surviving. He turns up, and victims are shit out of luck.

• The sex scene is rather hilarious, I thought. Joe’s squeeze just doesn’t prefer to be serviced after he’s done with his “machines”, and the beefy Frankie is just who she desires. But look out for that electrified bed post because it stings…or is that fries? At least Frankie went out with a bang. The electrocution sure is a stunner as the poor girl’s head blackens and her mouth clinches. And she lights up like a Christmas tree, too. Joey gets to go out in ironic fashion…what better way to hit the bricks than a tractor, with spinning blade, dropped right on you? 

• These death sequences have a bite to them, I thought. They are so impactful because the one killing has a lot of rage behind them. Even within the annals of dream logic, I could just picture Marty fantasizing within his make-believe world how gruesome the students who ruined his life would die. The more horrible, the better.

• The ending was kind of a downer. Marty getting even seemed to be a win for all those nerds out there that so desperately wanted to see their bullying jock/pretty people tormenters suffer. How many nerds probably dreamed, whether or intentional or not, of their tormenters enduring some sort of serious punishment?

• The characters are slasher regulars. The weed smokers, jocks, head babe, and practical jokers: a gleeful bunch of pricks who lived to pick on the likes of a Marty Retzen. Poor Marty gets dragged across the skuzzy bathroom floor while naked. He was hosed and recorded while naked. He is hung upside down, with his face stuffed down in a commode. Good grief, what did this kid do to these jerks?