Night School gives us an education in unique horror movie deaths right off the bat when a Boston teacher’s aide’s dome is lopped off as she whips around a carousel.
It’s enough to make your head spin too.
We’re no experts in stranger danger, but she could’ve at least let go and taken her chances being shot out of a merry-go-round at full tilt. Then again, with playground equipment being what it was in the 80s, that probably would’ve proved fatal too.
This event, as it were, sets in motion a police investigation.
The Boston cops find out that the vic went to a local night school, justifying the title of this film, and soon fingers point to an instructor who’s rumored to be quite the perv.
And lest you think he would be a marketing or English teacher, as we’ve seen from other horror films, the best discipline to study when it comes to offering longwinded exposition about weird killings or sexual practises, is of course, anthropology.
The guy is obviously sus, but so is a local slow-witted café worker. Red herrings, on the menu, anyone?
The killer’s MO is to skulk around on a motorbike, giving this one a very very slight giallo flavour a la Andrea Bianchi’s Strip Nude For Your Killer.
If you’re into college horrors, something like Blumhouse’s Happy Death Day is far preferable, or the sillier and far more entertaining for all the wrong reasons, Graduation Day, also from 1981.
**1/2 (out of 5)
Really Awful Movies 