It’s Friday…
Ahem…
I mean Frightday…
And I have some recommendations for you to enjoy this weekend…
Okay…
This Frightday’s theme is…
School is Scary AF.
The same year that Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie was released…
Another film that peered in at the darker side of high school…
Flew quietly under the radar…
And then landed gracefully…
In the downy nest of my Cult Classics collection…
That film was…
Massacre at Central High…
It is a film that at its gooey, cheesy epicenter…
You’ll find the essence of what made the years we spent in high school and/or college…
The nightmarish hell that it can often be…
The tribal classifications…
The surging hormones…
The underdeveloped brains…
The strong, the rich, and the attractive…
Taking their rightful positions of power…
And wielding that power wildly…
With its aim directed towards those…
That just don’t quite…
Make the grade.
So, let’s take a chronological look at the best, most frightening, and possibly even unknown to you, School is Scary AF Movies…In the years following Massacre at Central High.
Disturbing Behavior (1998) – Ahhh…the rare 90’s movie that makes the list…Like a friggin’ unicorn, I tell ya…This one was directed by David Nutter (X-Files, Game of Thrones)…And it’s sort of like The Stepford Teens…When Steve, played by James Marsden (HBO’s Westworld), moves to Cradle Bay after his family tries to rebound from his brother’s suicide…He becomes fast friends with the school’s outsiders…Who are all a wee bit more than troubled by the “Blue Ribbons”…An elite group of kids that have been subjected to mind control to correct their unruly or awkward characteristics that are keeping them from fitting in…There are some creepy and violent side effects that occur once the Stepford 2.0 software gets installed in these kids…And the ever-shrinking group of outsiders is all that’s left to stand up to those attempting to rob every last one of them of their uniqueness, or worse…Their lives.
The Woods (2006) – The follow-up to director Lucky McKee’s May, was a much-anticipated release…And although this film is more understated than his last, it did not deserve the much-maligned reception that sometimes comes on the heels of a successful first effort. May was a runaway train of a horror film whose intensity almost rattled it right off the tracks…But, The Woods, is a restrained carriage ride through the countryside, where the driver keeps pausing to let you gaze into the darkened forest…That being said, this is the story of Heather, a troubled teen who is dumped off by her parents at a strange little all-girls private school in rural New England…Pretty quickly, the audience can smell that something went funky in the fridge…The staff are both mysterious and menacing…The students are both dominating and disappearing…And both of these facts have a lot to do with the history of the forbidden woods adjacent to the school grounds…Oh yeah…And I have to mention that my boy Bruce Campbell has a small but crucial role as Heather’s father.
All The Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006) – Here’s one of those films that hit the festival circuit in 2006…But then wasn’t released to theaters until 2008…And then when it was…It was only released in the UK…Despite critical acclaim both at the festivals and following its theatrical release…Hell…Some critics even compared the cinematography to Tobe Hooper’s early work…It was sadly a full seven years later before audiences here in the states got a look at it…But I found this film to be a fantastic slasher film wrapped in a deep-fried wonton wrapper of high school angst and misery…It has great twists and turns as you dive head-first into the third act…And each of those twists and turns gave the film a real kick in the ding-ding…So many horror films falter in the third act…They don’t have the steam to get all the way home…Not this one…Nope…This one comes screaming across the finish line with blue smoke billowing up from its screeching tires.
Tormented (2009) – This film was directed by Jon Wright, the man who brought the two great tastes of Alcoholism and Alien Invasions together in his sophomore effort, Grabbers…He made his feature film debut with this supernatural slasher that really does an amazing job of showing the extreme measures of cruelty…On both sides…The in-crowd that abuse their fellow students at Fairview High School…And this spectral spook giving this remorseless gaggle of British bullies their fair share of comeuppance…The idea of a malicious ghost that can inflict serious slasher-style harm on those it attacks has been something that I always loved John Carpenter for…In films like The Fog, and Ghosts of Mars…His apparitions aren’t wispy little now-you-see-me-now-you-don’ts that float out of a fucking armoire and say “Boo!”… Nope not these ghosts…And just like a classic Carpenter ghost…The formerly alive student in this film carries out his revenge in the selfsame way.
F (a.k.a. The Expelled 2010) – This British masked slasher film is a favorite of mine…It was directed by Johannes Roberts, who recently helmed The Strangers: Prey at Night…And sure…It totally capitalizes on the hoodie horror craze that has been unnerving the teen-a-phobic masses across the pond for some time now…But it stands out among them…Instead of a bunch of ruffians causing havoc, and being generally disrespectful…In this film, we watch them fly from the confines of their hooded chrysalis as they become faceless, and relentless killers…Without genetic testing…Proving that these teens aren’t the distant progeny of Michael Myers might be a wee bit difficult…That is the magic of the masked slasher…When done right, the killer is like an emotionless robot…And here, we have a whole gaggle of them…It is like the freakin’ Myers Family Reunion…And…I don’t care how good the potato salad is…I ain’t going to that barbecue.
The Final (2010) – Part of the After Dark Horrorfest 8 Films To Die For…This film takes revenge on high school bullies to a whole nutha level of messed up…You know…That Hostel level of messed up…So…That being said…If you like your bully vengeance with a heaping helping of torture porn…Than this film is just what you’re looking for…Those who have been bullied have hatched a plan to pay back their oppressors…They have invited them all to a costume party…Once there…The bullies partake in some delicious punch which tastes surprisingly like a handful of roofies…When the elite group of teens with a superiority complex wake up…They are chained and surrounded by those deemed inferior to them…For reasons like what they look like, or what they believe in…These bullied ones take their time and brutally torture both the bodies and minds of those who perpetrated their daily doses of abuse…Yep…This is some pretty twisted shit.
The Lesson (2015) – Unlike the British film, F (a.k.a. The Expelled)…That I mentioned earlier…Rather than a gaggle of hooded hoodlums harassing a schoolteacher…In this film…The tables…Or rather the desks…Have turned…Mr. Gale is a twenty year veteran of teaching high school, and just might be at the end of his rope…This film begins its journey as a sort of art-house indie drama about being young…Being troubled…And being in love…But by the time Mr. Gale has the full attention of his students…It becomes a dark twisted smorgasbord of torture porn…And at first…I was sort of in Gale’s corner…Thinking these apathetic youths deserved the punishments that they were receiving…But as the third act gets underway…And another student joins the makeshift detention in Mr. Gale’s garage…We discover that these kids aren’t nearly as apathetic as we thought…And Mr. Gale is not nearly as justified…And he just might be in store for a little bit of detention himself.
Happy Death Day (2017) – I don’t know what to tell you…I dug this film…And I know…I know…It was totally a slasher film set to the music of Groundhog Day…But…So fucking what…It was a ton of fun…And I had a blast watching it…Mainly due to the diabolical resting bitch face of the film’s star, Jessica Rothe…Whose performance as Tree, carried with it, a scathing level of bitchiness that is both horrifying and delightful…As Tree starts each day following each death…She is brought closer and closer to discovering who is trying to murder her…Christopher Landon (Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) directed this film, as well as the sequel, released earlier this year…And despite both films being rated PG-13…Which can be a horrible curse for a horror film…This film manages to maximize its scares despite the minimized gore…I try not to simply write off a film for any reason…Sure this was a PG-13 horror…Sure it was ripping the shit off of Groundhog Day…But I went in…Sat down with an ass-load of people a third my age…And enjoyed every minute of it.
Pledge (2018) – As the nerdiest nerds to ever nerd attempt to pledge the fraternity with the best parties…They are met with resistance at every turn…Until they are given the opportunity to pledge a very exclusive fraternity…And this is when these three nerdy freshmen enter a bizarre and entirely inescapable world…And rather quickly…This is a decision that fills each of them with an overwhelming sense of regret…As soon as we are introduced to these geeky guys…There is a real likable quality to them…They really are…At there core…Just innocent kids who are trying to fit in…And as they descend deeper and deeper into the steaming pot of shit stew that they have jumped into…We are not only empathetic…We are also completely frightened by what we think is coming…But…The good news with this film…What you think…Isn’t always what you get…And the seventy-five minute running time…Flies by at a brisk pace, due to the thrilling events unfolding on the screen before you.
The Video Store Clerk 