Graduation Day (1981) 2022 revisit

I did consider getting the VS Blu but I just couldn't pull the trigger. The last few times I've watched this was on YouTube. I was glad to see it on Tubi. This is more a "Saturday nooner" for me than so late into Saturday morning after Midnight. Hard to really stay attentive during this one. While I enjoy how much of the film is at and around school/campus, it does seem to capture a different experience than my own. The students are just never in class but walking around, goofing off, still practicing their track/sports activities, gathered in their different friendship groups, and, for the most part, having a good time. "School's out for Summer" while for the track team being offed by a vengeful killer it is "School's out forever." Yes, low-hanging fruit. It really does feel like school in this LA type town has quite a lot of community interest.

Christopher George gets canned for his track star dropping dead while in a race and the film sort of offers him as a disgruntled red herring, though he's clearly not the one because he was on campus with his student athletes when one of them was jogging in a nearby wilderness trail. He is notorious for pushing his students hard, perhaps in the case of Mackenzie's sister, too hard. Mackenzie returns from the Navy to a crummy stepfather and submissive mother, confronting George for her sister's death. Everyone blames George and his track team don't like him. But Murphy killing his fellow track team members and getting George killed by Argenziano (a great television veteran; he is one of those character actors you know the face of) seems to be an odd slasher rationale...what did his team have to do with his girlfriend being pushed too hard by George?

Pataki as the hated (and lazy) principal and Peaker as his overworked (and taken advantage of...) secretary (who is also his lover) have some moments in the office built to show their strange relationship that seems built on attraction and animosity. I dug Mackenzie as the older sister eventually encountering the killer (Murphy looks a bit old in the tooth for a high school senior). The use of sports equipment as weapons does seem fitting considering track team members are the ones dying (very unnecessarily). The dead Laura's corpse turning up in her boyfriend's room as her sister shows up to find him talking about marrying her still (the two going out a window, yet he pops back up with her dead boy in his arms, no worse for wear) is a bizarre ending.

Herb Freed juxtaposing Laura's race and death through editing all across the film was rather annoying to me personally. I think we get it: the death left an indelible mark on many people. I think my favorite kill is when the guy is pole vaulting and lands on spikes (and the killer ends up being stabbed by them when Mackenzie pushes him into them).

Being the Quigley stan that I am, seeing her so cute, frisky, and unashamed to fuck the music teacher for a passing grade while mocking the local security guard who catches her smoking grass and nearly fucking her boyfriend is a lot of fun. The music teacher flirting with all the teenagers (he's not exactly a stud) as they get a bit too googly over him is right out of an 80s sex comedy...he finds a cassette recording of Quigley mocking him in the boiler room. This film feels like such an Up All Night type of movie. I do see why folks find it a meh slog, though.

Those who lived to graduate celebrated their 40th just last year! Including a very obnoxious Vanna White who, along with her equally irritating friend, finds a gymnast dead in her locker from a fencing blade.