Films That Witness Madness

review

GRADUATION DAY

GRADUATION DAY is the greatest slasher film ever made! It's incredibly action-packed and surprisingly intelligent! It's got everything you could ever want in a slasher film... Hyperactive editing? CHECK! Muddy cinematography? CHECK! Dull direction? CHECK! A bunch of thirty-somethings playing a bunch of teenagers? CHECK! Piss-poor special effects? CHECK! A completely obvious killer? CHECK! A gratuitous parallel bars performance? CHECK! Slow motion action scenes? CHECK! A pole vaulter falling onto a bed of spikes? CHECK! A jock impaled on the end of a spear that's been stuffed into a football? CHECK! A woman using her dead sister's corpse as a weapon? CHECK! Linnea Quigley's tits? CHECK! Vanna White? CHECKMATE!!! What more could you ask for?!?!?

OK, back to reality.

Poor Laura dies from a blood clot while running in a track meet. In true slasher fashion, a mysterious killer soon makes an appearance, killing off the remaining track team members one by one. Laura's sister Anne, who is on leave from the military wanders around somewhat aimlessly before befriending her sister's boyfriend Kevin. Laura's old coach has been accused of murder by some of the townspeople, his take-no-shit attitude and ruthless work ethic are blamed for Laura's untimely demise. But is Coach Michaels really the killer? Maybe it's the sleazy music teacher who flirts with the young girls? Or maybe it's the school Principle, an unsavory character who has a desk drawer full of switchblades and an obvious dislike for his students?

Of course, anyone who has seen enough of these movies already knows who the killer is just by reading that paragraph and that's the problem.

GRADUATION DAY was released in 1981, a scant three years after the release of the grandaddy of them all, HALLOWEEN. It was obvious that during those brief three years everything that could be done with a slasher film had been done. GRADUATION DAY is so routine and so lifeless that you'll be left wondering how this kinda slop once passed for entertainment. Slasher films have certainly not gone away since 1981 but they sure as hell have gotten slicker and better executed. Nothing in GRADUATION DAY is pulled off with any degree of skill or finesse. The brief on-screen violence is downright laughable and the whole film looks and feels like it's made of lead. A few brief guffaws at the expense of the cast - Christopher George is the only cast member who delivers anything close to a real performance - and a musical number performed in it's entirety by some lousy 80s rock band called Felony seals the deal. This is absolute garbage.

It's obvious that this was a movie made solely for the money. Slasher films were a new commercial commodity in the early 1980s and virtually every studio shit a half dozen out a year. Herb Freed, never a passable director, crosses every T and dots every I along the way, never straying from the formula that made HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH such huge hits at the box office. His desire to stick to that formula is just one of the many reasons GRADUATION DAY fails. There is simply nothing to distinguish it from the pack.

However, the biggest error on the part of the filmmaker's is the editing. I haven't seen so many cut-aways and cross-cutting since... fuck, I don't know... FOREVER. Like THE REINCARNATION OF ISABEL, this is a film that would kill a person with epilepsy. I couldn't count all the edits during the opening credit sequence alone. I lost count while trying to keep up. Whoever thought rapidly cutting back and forth between three, four, sometimes five camera set-ups was a good idea obviously has no idea what a good idea is. Worse yet, this machine gun editing is repeated ad nauseum throughout the entire film, often during the murder sequences. Is it not enough for you to try to bore us to death, Mr. Freed? You have to try and make our fucking heads explode, too?

Ugh... I hate this movie.

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