Hell High

The slasher film formula wasn’t exactly complicated but it did have some interesting variations.  One of the most notable was the use of a foggy prologue to hint at the killer’s motivations.  Deep Red, Halloween and Prom Night are all perfect examples, but even off-the-wall projects like Hell High (1989) weren’t above using the technique.  

Here a pretty-in-pink 8-year-old girl tosses mud on a passing motorcycle and causes the occupants to impale themselves on convenient spikes.   Cut to 18 years later and that girl has become Miss Brooke Storm (Maureen Mooney), a high school biology teacher whose students, led by notorious bad boy Dickens (Christopher Stryker), push her to the edge of a nervous breakdown.  Her fragile sanity finally snaps when Dickens and his gang pull a prank using the swamp noxious swamp mud, not realizing the tables will soon turn…and history is destined to be repeated.

 

Hell High is more home invasion than horror film.  But it’s so wildly unpredictable most fans won’t mind the subtle drift from genre expectations.  Cast with the usual twenty-somethings playing teenagers, lead actor Christopher Stryker is a compelling bad boy to say the least.  Played with a psychotic self-destructive bent – and just a hint of latent homosexuality – Dickens is a character to be reckoned with in the history of high-school bullies.  So much so that Maureen Mooney’s go-for-broke performance as Miss Storm is almost loss in the shuffle of unexpected plot twists.

 

Director Douglas Grossman is never quite sure where his film is going, but he gets it there with competent style nonetheless.  There’s a hint of “regional release” to the production, which was shot years earlier before it finally found limited theatrical exposure.   Not easy to pigeonhole and all-but impossible to second guess, Hell High is sure to turn a few heads now that it has the audience it deserves.

 

Arrow Film’s special edition Blu-ray features a gloriously colorful hi-def transfer pulled from the original negative along with several cast interviews, location tour, deleted scenes, alternate opening titles (this one reads Real Trouble), trailers and three audio commentaries, including one from Joe Bob Briggs whose original video introduction is left an as option during playback.

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