STUDENT BODIES
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1981) 0 (out of four)
Statistics have shown us most slasher movies outright suck. They're formula-ridden, low-budget flicks where the same stock characters commit the same stock sins before getting killed off one by one by some bulky, masked killer. The worst thing about it is that most slasher movies take themselves completely seriously, making the entire genre ripe for parody. And yet the few times any movie has tried to parody the genre (MOTEL HELL, RETURN TO HORROR HIGH), it turned out worse than the straight slasher movies. STUDENT BODIES is no exception.
It takes its cue from HALLOWEEN in particular, making its killer "The Breather," a guy who makes obscene heavy-breathing noises before taking his victims. And every time a victim is taken, a big white number is superimposed on the screen to register the body count. Throughout the movie, more white words pop up on the screen, mostly intended to make us laugh or to needlessly point out that someone is "Unconscious, Not Dead (Important To Plot)."
It's supposed to be funny, but none of it is. The horny high school characters satirized here were more outrageous in their original slasher movie incarnations. To make them funny would require more than just giving them lame jokes to tell and having them hump like bunnies every few minutes. One girl and guy sneak under the bleachers at the Homecoming game to have sex on the ground, but all sorts of trash slips through the bleachers and lands on them. When the girl complains, the guy replies, "The garbage gets me hot." Classic comedy? Comedy, period? No.
STUDENT BODIES starts out on a ridiculous note, with subtitles reading, "Halloween... Friday the 13th... Jamie Lee Curtis' Birthday," and the movie just gets worse from there. Soon the phone is ringing so hard it jumps off the table and The Breather himself is interrupting the movie to announce we have technical difficulties (more like "creative difficulties"), "killing" time by asking us if we can guess who he is.
Yes, on top of it all, STUDENT BODIES is supposed to be a murder mystery. But the big mystery is how this appalingly bad movie was ever made. Perhaps the best clue is in the very first set of superimposed white words, which inform us that "Last year, twenty-six horror movies were released... None of them lost money." I have a feeling this one did.
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