A bizarre attempt to make a slasher comedy that skirts very close to being enjoyably meta, but never quite makes the final stretch, Return To Horror High could have been a lot of gory fun. There was a chance to fill the cast out with disposable victims, an easy excuse to have gratuitous violence and nudity while commenting on the use of gratuitous violence and nudity (as there’s a film within a film device that I will get to in a minute), and a sharper script could have helped make this into a minor classic. We don’t get a sharper script though. We get something thrown together by Mark Lisson, Dana Escalante, Greg H. Sims, and director Bill Froehlich. The fact that most of these people went on to do very few other feature films, or none at all, isn’t all that surprising, but at least they tried to do something a bit different here.
Crippen High School is infamous for a series of murders that happened there in the early 1980s. A movie is now being made about that horrible time, and the whole thing is being filmed in the actual school where the murders happened. It isn’t long until we see that the killer feels the urge to kill again, with a whole new group of characters to pick off, but it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of what is reality and what is cinematic trickery, as the film we are watching starts jumping between the two in a way that is difficult to keep track of.
I watched this film for two reasons. One, it had been on my radar for many years, due to the presence of a young George Clooney in his film debut. Two, a number of podcasts I enjoy listening to had covered this, and I like to see a movie before it is potentially spoiled for me while others dissect and discuss it. I suspect I now know what the general consensus is on this, it’s bad, but fun, although I am also now really looking forward to hearing what others think of it.
Because it’s bad, but fun.
Despite not having a stellar cast, a lot of the fun does come from people enjoying themselves onscreen. Clooney aside, he’s there for only a minute or two, you have Alex Rocco being an amusingly sleazy film-maker, Andy Romano as an amusingly nervy school prinicpal/red herring/possible killer, and Lori Lethin as the main actress in the film-within-the-film, given multiple roles that require her to throw on wigs and exaggerate some mannerisms to remind everyone that she’s portraying a number of different characters. It’s as bemusing as it is silly, but Lethin seems to enjoy herself so much that her enthusiasm and glee are infectious whenever she’s onscreen.
It’s a shame that the director and writers don’t manage to do more to improve the style and pace of the film. This is another slasher film from this decade that is plagued with horribly low lighting levels and a lack of proper bloodshed, and it’s always hard to know if those things were the result of clumsy movie-making or an attempt to avoid clashing with censors. There are also some gags that are spoiled by the edit/pacing, particularly a couple of moments at the very end of the film that I think could have been presented in a more impactful way.
Every horror movie fan knows that, while it is viewed as a golden age, the 1980s also gave us a great number of films that were, and still are, absolutely terrible. Return To Horror High isn’t one of those. It’s not great, and particularly disappoints when it comes to the actual moments of horror, but it’s funny and unique enough to be worth your time. Just the once.
5/10
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