HELL HIGH

Directed by Douglas Grossman. United States. 1987.

One sunny afternoon, little Brooke Storm wanders down to the local swamp to play with her dolls in a rundown shack. She is rudely interrupted when a biker breaks in, manhandles his girlfriend’s breasts, and tears the head off of her favorite doll. To get even, Brooke grabs a bucket of swamp sludge and hurls it in the biker’s face as the couple speeds away. This otherwise harmless prank has an unintended side effect. The bike veers off the dirt path and crashes into a ditch. When Brooke goes to check on the biker and his girlfriend, she finds them impaled on some rusty poles. Oopsie daisy.

Many years later, Brooke is now an emotionally dysregulated biology teacher at a high school full of insufferable shit stains and football players. Those are the only two types of students that exist in this world. As we will soon see, if you’re not one, you’re doomed to become the other.

The worst one of them all is Dickens, a completely unremarkable specimen of undeserved arrogance. Dickens has a couple of friends, token riot girl Queenie and, because this is an 80s movie, a fat obnoxious jokester named Smiler. They’re the kind of bullies that only exist in movies. Not physically imposing. Not especially clever. If Dickens had been punched in the face at least once during his childhood, this whole movie could have been prevented. It’s difficult to be that much of a prick when you know what it feels like when knuckles meet your jawbone.

Dickens recruits pretty boy Jon-Jon into the gang. Until recently, Jon-Jon played football, but quit because he was tired of being hit. Now everyone calls him a coward. Why a guy like Jon-Jon even knows who Dickens is or why he’d ever want anything to do with him… well, this is the one concession you need to make for this film to work. In any ordinary universe, these guys would not willingly share oxygen.

Dickens and Co. decide to focus all of their miscreant energy on tormenting Brooke. They even follow her home one day, watching from a window as her body double masturbates in the shower. Jon-Jon meets up with Queenie at her house the next day. The two hit it off right away. Queenie offers him some really good life advice, which isn’t surprising as she looks to be fifteen years older than him. She probably has a lot more life experience. Her body double flashes her tits at him, and the new couple heads off to the high school football game.

Bored by the game, our gruesome foursome drives their car onto the field, intercepts a pass, and then speeds off to god knows where. Later, they head to the swamp for a couple of garbage bags full of that ooey-gooey swamp sludge before laying siege to Brooke’s home. They don Halloween masks, jump on her roof, and toss sludge at her windows. They’re only stopped by the arrival of Brooke’s school friend.

Brooke is having full-on PTSD-induced flashbacks after getting pelted in the face by sludge. Images of impaled bikers flash before her eyes, reminding us of when all of this resembled a horror movie. Her friend washes her face, tucks her into bed, and shoves a Quaalude down her whimpering throat. She doesn’t call the cops or anything, let alone ask why the outside walls are covered in muck or why Brooke’s front door window is smashed in. Nope, she drugs her and fucks off like a good friend.

Dickens reenters the house and sexually assaults the barely conscious Brooke. Tired of waiting for Dickens to show up at the car, Queenie heads back and finds him straddling their drugged-up biology teacher. She tells him to stop, calls him a perv… and then starts molesting her too. Just when you think this might go full-on rape/revenge, Jon-Jon makes his appearance, smacking Dickens around just long enough for Brooke to regain consciousness and throw herself out the second-story window. Classic Brooke.

With their biology teacher lying face down on the lawn outside, the foursome immediately goes into self-preservation mode. They eventually come up with a scheme to frame the school quarterback. Jon-Jon heads off to do the framing, while the other three stay put and bicker. Fed up with Dickens being Dickens, Queenie hightails it out of there, only to discover Brooke’s body has gone missing. Oh, and there’s only like 15 minutes left in the movie.

HELL HIGH is all about the dangers of failing in with the wrong crowd. It’s also a PSA about the many dangers of swamp sludge. It can lead to motorcycle crashes, stained vinyl siding, psychotic breaks, and the overwhelming desire to fondle a middle-aged woman. The film is also heavily backloaded, with all the blood and nastiness occurring within the final act. That’s normally a big turn-off for me, but oddly enough HELL HIGH is so breezy and laid back that I barely notice the clock while watching it.

It’s not a particularly great film, but I’d be hard-pressed to find a reason not to watch it at least once. The performances, especially Christopher Stryker as Dickens and Jason Brill as Smiler, are absolutely grating, but that’s what they’re supposed to be. Stryker in particular creates one of the most immature and detestable screen villains in all mid-tier 80s horror. On the other hand, Jon-Jon is too weakly written to be effective. A good kid falling into the wrong crowd? Come on, that’s positively overflowing with great dramatic possibilities. Unfortunately, Jon-Jon never feels like he has agency. He just goes along with the crowd, which makes his resistance to the peer pressure from his old coach and teammates feel improbable. Jon-Jon would have caved instantly, just as he does throughout the entire film.

I wanted a stronger dichotomy, a real clash of wills. But I also understand that neutering Jon-Jon’s agency is what allows our trio of miscreants to really dive into the deep end of degeneracy. Constant moral bickering would have brought the momentum to a crawl.

A good revenge story is only as good as its violence. Thankfully, though brief, the violence on display here is glorious. A head is smashed in with a rock. A pencil is rammed into a neck, and a kitchen knife thuds wonderfully into someone’s shoulder. There’s even a hilarious simultaneous double death to send the movie out on a high note. Because the revenge is confined to such a short amount of time, it never reaches the level of ludicrous catharsis as, say, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, but it does the trick nicely.

HELL HIGH is a mid-tier movie made at the tail end of the 80s. It isn’t high art or high class. Hell, for 80% of the running time, it feels more like a lame 80s coming-of-age movie than a horror movie. But it’s well-paced, filled with memorable (if not especially likable) characters, and the bloody comeuppance of the climax is emotionally and viscerally satisfying. I like when bad things happen to bad people, and this film is full of assholes. It won’t leave a lasting impression, but like a hefty wad of swamp sludge, it’ll stick to your eyeballs for an hour and a half. There are much worse ways to pass some time.