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When Push Comes to Shove: Slaughter High & Bullying

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For anyone who has ever been pushed around (and haven’t we all at one point), Slaughter High is a revenge seeker’s wet dream. Marty (Simon Scuddamore) is probably the nerdiest nerd this side of Kenny Hampson (Terror Train). But he’s kind of lovable in that totally annoying way most dorks are. In the first scenes of Slaughter High, we get the impression that Marty doesn’t really know how truly geeky he is. He really thinks he can get it on with Carol (Caroline Munro), the oldest high school kid in history. Hey, older women are often temptresses, right (Private Lessons, anyone)? But Carol is only a decoy for what becomes one of the most disturbing prank scenes in slasher history. Not only is Marty given a nasty swirly, he’s also dunked nude. It’s pure degradation and it only gets worse from there. Then, he actually seems to forgive his attackers, and thanks to a big marijuana ciggy, and some unfortunately placed acid, Marty sets himself on fire! All because he dared to try to be cool.

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April Fool’s Week

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Holy guacamoley, we really outdid ourselves this year with the April fool’s day prank, which consisted of two co-ordinated efforts for a winning result. Our complete and total rule is best exemplified in the comments on Blood Test, where longtime reader Tuzo wrote “I used to [love] the April Fool’s day jokes on this site, but you guys are slipping a bit in your obviousness. Good try, though.” Dave’s spectacular fake Blood Test was the classic red herring which successfully bait-and-switched you all away from calling out Thomas’ fabricated Honeymoon Killer piece, the more nuanced affair. Once again Retro Slashers wins the pig, the keg, and the paper crown! See you next year. Now for some history and what you can expect this coming week.

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“Best Slasher Flick of All Time” Finally Released (APRIL FOOL’S)

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Slasher fanatics everywhere, rejoice – new boutique DVD company Hoa-X is releasing Deacon Natterling’s unseen 1980 Canadian slasher Blood Test on April 1. It’s final exam time at Hillcrest College, and someone is killing the students one-by-one using the most bizarre methods imaginable. It seems the victims were all part of a treehouse club when they were kiddies, until an initiation mishap left 12-year-old initiates Carl burned beyond recognition, Amelia with total amnesia, and Boner dead – or is he? Seven years later, someone is getting revenge.

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EXCLUSIVE: Code Red’s Nightmare 2-Disc Set Finally

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Code Red received quite a bashing from the genre DVD community for taking their own sweet time assembling a special edition of Nightmare (1981). Romano Scavolini’s film is a virtual camera lens inside the mind of a sweaty, mouth-foaming psychotic, and required special handling to bring this 2-Disc DVD to fruition. July 5th will see the sleazy slasher finally released onto the streets. Take a squiz at the details Code Red exclusively shared with Retro Slashers.

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Blue Underground to Release Torso on Blu-ray

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Along with Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava, Sergio Martino was one of the most successful Italian filmmakers working in the giallo genre during the 1970s. Among his most acclaimed work were La coda dello scorpione (The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) and l tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave (Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key), yet perhaps his most overlooked was his 1973 thriller I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale (Carnal Violence). More commonly known under its alternative title Torso, the movie is one of Martino’s more explicit features, which included a significant amount of nudity. The film’s climax – in which heroine Suzy Kendall is chased around the house by a masked killer – could be considered an influence on the subsequent slasher cycle.

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The Prowler’s Farley Granger R.I.P.

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It is a common method for ageing actors whose glory days are long behind them to accept roles in low budget horror movies in order to remain in the public spotlight. The slasher genre saw such esteemed screen legends as Jack Palance, Glenn Ford and Donald Pleasence appearing in a variety of pictures during the cycle’s heyday. Farley Granger, perhaps most famous for his work with Alfred Hitchcock on the classics Rope and Strangers on a Train, followed major success both on screen and Broadway with the Italian thriller La polizia chiede aiuto (What Have They Done to Your Daughters?), before taking one of the lead roles in Joseph Zito’s 1981 slasher The Prowler.

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By Sword, By Pick, By Axe: The Making of The Mutilator

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Critics may scoff and most film fans may turn their noses up at them, but the slasher genre is the perfect training ground for a young, wannabe filmmaker. With an almost non-existent budget, a simple premise, aided by a likeable cast and some inventive special effects, can result in a modest performance at the box office. It is the one genre that was at its most lucrative outside of the studio system; Friday the 13th was produced without the assistance of Paramount Pictures, who later purchased the film and ran an extensive publicity campaign, and John Carpenter’s independent hit Halloween would inspire a generation of filmmakers to shoot their own cheap thrillers.

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Coppola’s Dementia 13 Making Its Way to Blu-ray

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Over the last couple of years there have been countless Roger Corman productions that have made their way to Blu-ray and now the latest to be upgraded is Francis Ford Coppola’s commercial debut Dementia 13. Having completed work on a picture entitled The Young Racers in Ireland, Corman discovered that he still had some of his budget remaining and so offered Coppola the chance to direct a quick thriller using actors and props from the production, a common method for Corman. Considered by some to be a prototype for the slasher cycle that would follow over a decade later, Dementia 13 slipped into obscurity for many years before being rediscovered on home video.

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Murder on Film? The Story of Snuff

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Although they had courted controversy throughout the latter half of the 1960s with a string of sexploitation pictures that became regular attractions around Times Square, little did Michael and Roberta Findlay know that their legacy would be that of a supposed snuff film. Despite the revelation at the end of the movie that fooled audiences into believing the events to be real, the filmmakers themselves played no part in this, nor the shameless marketing that further fuelled the rumours that an actress in the movie had in fact been murdered in front of the camera. But what exactly is a ‘snuff’ film? One dictionary defines it as ‘a pornographic movie of an actual murder.’

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