The only feature film directed by Douglas Grossman, co-written with Leo Evans (who has this listed on IMDb as his only writing credit), Hell High is the kind of mess you get when people try, a bit too late, to cash in on a craze that they don't really view as a challenge. Because, as many of them as we had throughout the 1980s, every slasher movie fan knows that a GOOD slasher movie is a lot harder to deliver than a bad one. Hell High is a pretty bad one, and many people might not view it as a slasher at all, but I am going to class it within that sub-genre because that's the only way to give it credit for some positives.
It starts with a tragic accident. Most slasher movies do. We then move forward by a few decades. Miss Brooke Storm (Maureen Mooney) is the adult version of the young girl we saw just witnessing a majorly traumatic event, and now she works as a teacher. Having embarrassed one of her students, Dickens (Christopher Stryker), in front of the whole class, Miss Storm doesn't realise that she will be the target of some very malicious revenge. One thing leads to another, Miss Storm ends up almost comatose, there's a squirm-inducing scene of sexual assault (some may view it as attempted assault, many will agree with me that it's horribly successful and disturbing), and it all ends with someone apparently dying. That's when the murders properly begin, all crammed into a third act that never truly rewards viewers for making it through the rest of the film.
The biggest problem with Hell High is that it doesn’t quite know how to best be what it so clearly wants to be. There are some slasher movie touchstones (the opening trauma, the catalyst for a dark revenge plot, the moment when an unhinged character just gives in to murderous impulses), but they are bogged down in a plot that spends far too much time on drama and bickering between numerous actors all trying to pass themselves off as high school students.
Stryker benefits from the fact that he is playing the nasty ringleader of a group, and Millie Prezioso benefits from being the one female member, Queenie, but both Christopher Cousins and Jason Brill barely make any impression, which is really saying something when Cousins proves to be the character that viewers end up spending more time with during some important moments. And then there’s Mooney, who doesn’t do terrible work, despite the script having her more restrained for a fair chunk of the runtime when having her be all-out raging and murderous is clearly the better option.
It’s obvious that the biggest problem here is a misguided script by Evans and Grossman, and I am absolutely not surprised that this was their last feature film (some are destined for greatness, some are destined to give us one or two oddities before finding their calling elsewhere), but the direction from Grossman doesn’t help matters at all. Every major decision seems to forget that a film like benefits from decent pacing, fluctuating levels of energy, a standout death or two, and maybe even some witty homages that show those involved at least know the territory they have decided to make their mark in.
Absolutely forgettable, disappointingly incompetent in a way that doesn’t even prove laughable, as it is just too flat throughout, and full of moments that you can tell we’re just misjudged (in tone and/or execution), Hell High is not one I can recommend to even the most undemanding of slasher movie fans. And we’re generally not a very demanding lot anyway.
3/10
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