Verdict
Summary
Some of the gore gags are kind of suspenseful in the way they’re built up, and the movie is pretty entertaining for a slasher.
Plot: Who’s been decapitating the innocent girls at a local night school? The police are baffled.
Review: A motorcycle-helmeted maniac is going around Boston at night and decapitating young women. At first it seems random, but by the third murder (in as many consecutive nights), the police realize they have a serial slasher at work. A detective on the case (played by Leonard Mann) quickly makes a connection to the victims: They all attend the same night school for women, and so his sights immediately focus on an anthropology professor who has a reputation for sleeping with his students. Meanwhile, the professor’s sultry assistant (played by the stunning Rachel Ward who has an eyebrow-raising nude scene) may or may not be the next victim on the killer’s list. With only a few suspects for the detective to focus on, and a ritual the killer seems to be copying from a native tribe in Borneo, there’s only so much time left before the killer strikes again.
On the surface, Night School is just another stalker / slasher flick that was released during the slasher boom of the early 1980’s. If you look a little deeper at it, it proves to be a more mature, more introspective film with complex characters with dimension, and it also doesn’t star a bunch of young people just out of high school or college. It stars adults and it’s about adults, which is refreshing for this type of horror film. Some of the gore gags are kind of suspenseful in the way they’re built up, and the movie is pretty entertaining for a slasher. From director Kenneth Hughes.
Warner Archives recently released Night School to Blu-ray as part of their Archive Collection, and it’s a nice upgrade from their previous on-demand DVD release. Still, though, the picture quality isn’t up to the 2K or 4K restoration image quality of media labels like Shout Factory, Kino, or Arrow, but it’s nice to have a high definition release of this title. Now, if only Warner Archives would release Killer Party and Scream for Help onto Blu-ray …