Return to Horror High

Jesus, where do I even begin with this trash fire. Let’s just list the sins. The movie is about a movie being filmed in a high school where a series of murders occurred five years prior, only murders start occurring on the set. Got that? It’s unnecessarily convoluted. For a horror comedy, what is in the movie that approaches comedy is painfully stupid. Insulting, insipid, moronic, nonsensical garbage. The movie is told in a non-linear fashion, with the last survivor relaying the story to the cops after the slaughter of the movie cast and crew. There’s two problems with this; owe’ll get to in a minute. The other is that the survivor narrates events they were not present for, including someone’s dreams. The movie is constantly trying to trick the viewer with “are we watching the movie or the movie within the movie” bullshit. It’s childish and unnecessary, because often, these scenes don’t match the tone or plot of the rest of the movie. Even dumber is when they pull the “oh it’s just the movie within the movie” gag, and then pull it back a further layer that this gag was a dream. FUCK YOU MOVIE. For a slasher, this is light on blood. Most of the kills happen off screen, in fact. There’s a reason for this, but the problem is, while it can be justified in plot, it renders the movie toothless. It’s a SLASHER. It should have BLOOD. And that brings us to the trifecta of twists at the end, starting with #1: the movie makes you think the killer is the African-American janitor, only to pull a MOTHERFUCKING SCOOBY DOO GAG and it’s a white guy underneath. Putting aside how racially problematic that is, 1) A LITERAL SCOOBY DOO GAG. 2) the movie makes it clear this is a rubber mask, but it has moved just like a human face all movie. They can’t get rubber masks to do that NOW. Certainly not in 1987. And 3) even if you set all that aside, WHAT ABOUT HIS HANDS AND NECK, WHICH ARE CLEARLY VISIBLE WHILE WEARING THE MASK?!? But then, to add on to this parfait of shit, we get twist #2: IT WAS ALL FAKE. The producer of the movie within the movie set up everything as a publicity stunt, so they could do some sort of “the case and crew died but the movie lives on” trick. There are SO MANY PROBLEMS with this. How long do they plan on keeping up the charade of being dead? Since they didn’t finish shooting the film, how will they even be able to release it? Isn’t faking your death against the law? And, most importantly, they don’t let EITHER LEAD ACTOR KNOW ABOUT IT. Callie, the female star, is bad enough. Her costar, Stephen? He’s also a cop! A cop who has a connection to the murders five years prior! Oh, and the cop? He was originally brought on as a technical advisor, and filled in for an actor who walked off the set because he got a better part. That wasn’t part of the publicity stunt. So, this moron producer had this insane, potentially illegal plan, and put it in place with a REAL COP ON THE SET?!? And then there’s the final issue. Callie and Stephen, convinced these murders are real and it’s the return of the original killer (since he or she was never caught), figure out who the killer is, because HE’S REALLY ON SET. It’s the principal (also a tech consultant), who is also the father of Stephen’s high school girlfriend, who disappeared. He killed all of his daughter’s exes, and now he wants Stephen …. But he’s been waiting this whole time, even though Stephen is a local cop. So they have the big final showdown, and Stephen hurls a javelin (with enough force to pin the man to a concrete wall) into his chest. This doesn’t kill him; in fact, the cops clear the school and he pulls the javelin out of his chest and dies in a hail of gunfire. Which means this cockamamie publicity stunt REALLY GOT SOMEBODY KILLED. Sure, a serial killer, but still, THEY ENDANGERED THE LIVES OF THEIR LEAD ACTRESS AND A COP AND RESULTED IN THE DEATH OF ANOTHER PERSON. And the stinger — of the script writer being the principal’s son, and he’s angry about how the movie went, and he’s gonna write a sequel, and it’s hinted that his dad finds him, still dropping blood from a hole in the center of his chest and over a dozen gunshot wounds? Yeah, that’s a thing too. A big pile of bullshit.  This isn’t a bad slasher. This is just a bad movie, period. It’s script is an overly complicated, convoluted, shit-swamp of a thing. It doesn’t just ask you to forget logic, it shoots logic in the back of the head and dumps it in a storm drain. It openly mocks your intelligence by trying to be a horror comedy and a meta movie all at once, and it can’t even manage half of one of those. Fuck this movie with a barbed wire dildo and sandpaper lube.