I can’t figure out how to even vaguely approach talking about the film in any kind of approximation of what it feels like to watch it, so let’s instead begin with a God’s-eye view of the story. In 1982, there was a series of violent murders at a certain Crippen High School, with both teachers and students falling to the butchery of a killer who was never found. In 1987, a film production company by the name of Cosmic Pictures has decided to turn this tragedy into the fuel for a tasteless exploitation horror film, which represents an impressive amount of cynicism on the parts of Return to Horror High screenwriters Bill Froehlich & Mark Lisson and Dana Escalante & Greg H. Sims: as far as I’m aware even the grossest actual 1980s slasher film producers stayed clear of using a true-crime approach to coming up with their scenarios. But they did want to overindex on grossness, because the representative of Cosmic Pictures on-hand to oversee production is a flamboyant sleazeball named Harry Sleerik; he’s played by Alex Rocco, who arguably counts as a form of stunt casting, since his best-known role by far is as flamboyant sleazeball Moe Greene in The Godfather. Which is a hell of a film to get to name-drop in one’s review of a 1987 slasher film remembered solely by genre faithful and even that mostly for a different casting choice. Anyway, one of Harry’s impressively repulsive ideas has been to film this retelling of the Crippen High killings within the actual confines of Crippen High, for a heady combination of verisimilitude, cost-cutting, and getting several individuals who were around for the 1982 events to serve as technical consultants. In what should absolutely comes as no surprise, the hidden killer from 1982 has been roused by this activity. All of this is laid out in a text crawl right at the start of the movie, before the credits even, so the movie is able to skip ahead to the denouement: Crippen High School, late at night, with everybody dead or missing other than screenwriter Arthur Lyman (Richard Brestoff), who attempts to relate the events of the second Crippen High killing spree to two cops, Chief Deyner (Pepper Martin) and Officer Tyler (Maureen McCormick, who is unquestionably the main piece of stunt casting – if the name doesn’t ring a bell, she played Marcia Brady on The Brady Bunch – but she’s still not who I was talking about).
So just to recap: we start at the end, and everybody is dead. That’s one layer of the film. The main layer is Arthur’s flashbacks to the events of the last few days – which are absolutely not in any way whatsoever presented from his perspective – of the movie shoot, and the deaths and disappearances along the way. And then a third layer is the movie-within-the-movie reenactments of the events in 1982, including at least one of the deaths that happened five years ago but is presented to us, the viewers of the New World Pictures release Return to Horror High, as though it was an “actual” death scene. Indeed, that fake-even-within-the-context-of-the-movie death is the one that got the MPAA so up in arms that it had to be trimmed to avoid an X rating, which is a neat achievement for a slasher film as late as 1987: they were mostly self-neutering by that point, but I wonder if the filmmakers thought they could get away with it because it wasn’t “real”.
In short, we have here a movie that wants to be Scream 3 thirteen years in advance, and without having the benefit of there being a Scream 1 to serve as a baseline. Although I guess you could say this is also its own version of Scream 1, what with its self-aware comic commentary on the shopworn tropes of slasher cinema, and its attempt to deconstruct those tropes by embodying them. I don’t much like Scream, but I’ll say this much for it: it was made by honest-to-God filmmakers who understood how to approach the tonally complicated task they had assigned themselves. Whereas in this case of Return to Horror High, this was the first thing Bill Froehlich had ever directed, and it was the last thing he directed that didn’t premiere on television. He’s so much not an honest-to-God filmmaker that at the time I write this, he doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page. Somebody with the intellectual caution and strategic delicacy of Wes Craven he absolutely ain’t. And this is painfully, overwhelmingly obvious from the evidence of Return to Horror High itself, which upon having set for itself the challenge of moving between three different narrative registers, apparently adopted the explicit philosophy of “whatever, the audience will figure it out”.
I want to stress, this becomes a problem immediately. Back to that opening: Deyner and Tyler, trying to get the lay of the land, talk to each other about the rest of the cops they have on-hand. CUT TO: a cop walking through the interior of Crippen High. Every film viewer going back to the 1920s would interpret this the same way: this is one of Deyner and Tyler’s cops, wandering through the interior of the school, looking for clues. Nope! This is Steven Blake (Brendan Hughes), who was hired by the film shoot as a consultant, for two reasons: first because he’s a cop now, second because he was a Crippen student in 1982, and in fact he was dating one of the people who went missing during the massacre. And also it’s now a week before the opening scene, and the film crew has just arrived to set up shop in the school and get the lay of the land. There is no cue that tells us this: not in the writing, not in the formal construction. It just hits a point where it doesn’t make sense – not even right at the cut, because it makes sense then, it just makes the “wrong” sense. Nope, we just watch the movie like normal, and then after some short while it suddenly becomes clear that it’s all gone wrong, so we have to go back and reconstruct what’s actually happening. To extend some very insincere credit to Froehlich, I doubt very much this was a “mistake”. It’s too visible for that – I’m pretty sure he did this on purpose, because he thought it would be clever or artistic. “Aha”, this transition seems to say, “how crafty of me to find this way of dislocating the viewer’s sense of reality right from the start. Now the viewer will be constantly on alert to remain mindful of the blurred lines between Now and Then, between Real and Staged.” For as the film goes on, it will happen again: routinely, we’re dropped into a scene that appears to involve the killer stalking the film crew, only it eventually becomes clear (sometimes after literally several minutes) that we’re watching the film crew stage the killer stalking teenagers five years ago. Meanwhile, there are absolutely no signifiers to help us keep track of things: the cinematography doesn’t change, the tone doesn’t change, and the fact that we see a bunch of unfamiliar actors doesn’t really help because new characters keep drifting in the whole time. Sometimes, Lori Lethin, who plays the lead actress Callie Cassidy, wears different wigs, and that’s close to the only way to immediately place where we are in the narration.
I have no idea why Froehlich felt that this was a good approach to take: I can imagine why a different film might want to take advantage of a constant blurriness between “we’re watching a movie about a movie” and “we’re watching the movie being made within the movie” and “we’re just watching a movie”, but nothing in Return to Horror High is operating in a mode that’s designed to take advantage of that. It does sometimes feel like the filmmakers are trying to make a claim about the immortality of making, selling, and watching violent horror films: multiple characters have very explicit lines to that effect, an effects artist refers to a gore effect as “blatant abuse of the audience”, which is just a magnificently wrong-headed sentiment for A) an effects artist to make about B) the kind of people who pay money to watch slasher movies, especially given that C) it’s not a very convincing or gross gore effect. It’s just a bucket of stage blood. Maybe he considers that it’s “abuse” because it looks so stupid, but that’s emphatically not the way it’s presented. Also, Harry the disgusting producer is always, always the person tasked with saying things like “more blood!” and “more tits!” and reminding people that they’re all here to pander to people’s basest desires, and because he’s disgusting and Rocco is playing him with a kind of satanic hunger, we can tell that the film thinks that because Harry says it, it must be Bad, despite this actually being the job and Harry demonstrating that he has a good understanding of how to successfully operate within a for-profit film industry that requires selling people a product they wish to buy. Point being, Return to Horror High inconsistently, but very openly, has smug disdain for exploitation films and horror, and I guess there’s some possibility that this is tied in with the way that it’s very difficult to parse layers of in-film reality: movies like this break your brain and make it hard to tell what’s fake from what’s actual violence, they desensitize you. I don’t know. I promise I would like to understand what the fuck Return to Horror High thinks is happening with its baroque scene transitions, but I can’t come up with anything that actually makes sense within the film as constituted (everything I just typed about broken brains and not being able to tell reality from movies is absolutely not carried through the film in any sort of sustained way).
Anyway, that’s just one problem I had with the movie, a frequent issue but also sort of small in the grand scheme. But then, the grand scheme is such a smeary mess that there’s really not much nice to say and a lot of nitpicking. The plot is so tangled up in meta-storytelling that it basically doesn’t exist; at a certain point, I simply could not tell you why certain events follow certain other events, what’s happening, who knows that there’s a killer around. It’s basically just scenes, all of them themed to either “watching people make a slasher movie” or “a killer is stalking a high school”, but I don’t think the movie would be more or less rich or coherent if you took any of them out, or replaced them with different scenes. Ostensibly, it’s a mystery in which Callie and Steve are trying to figure out who’s killing people onset, but I’m not actually sure that they do any investigating before they stumble onto the killer’s lair, and I’m not actually certain who knew that there were people being killed in the first place. The film ends on a few separate twists that just add a whole bunch of “but why… and then how… so are the cops just straight-up blind then?” complications, making the whole thing even harder to parse.
So all we have left is: vibes. And to its credit, I could imagine somebody liking the vibes of Return to Horror High, though I did not. One thing I didn’t really bother going into is that this is all presented as a comedy, not even a tremendously dark one in some cases, and at the very least both McCormack and Rocco understand that their acting is responsible for helping sell the jokes – McCormack is in a different, much weirder and more unhinged version of this than the rest of the cast, and I even genuinely liked most of what she was up to – or even just to create the jokes, since to a certain extent the only thing that makes this “funny” is that people onscreen aren’t taking it seriously. That’s a big risk for the film to take, and it doesn’t pay off: there are certainly more bad performances than good ones (though McCormack and Rocco aren’t the only good ones), and Lethin in particular is a vacant wall of neither charisma nor personality nor consistent attitude, and even if the rest of the film was working better, it wouldn’t be able to survive her performance in what is maybe the central role, insofar as the film has a central role.
Still, there’s a chaotic loopiness that I could see someone finding “funny”, and I would imagine that if you find this funny, a lot of the patchiness in the script-writing might feel in keeping with the general energy. But even there, the film doesn’t commit to being funny: the cinematography generally (and not always effectually) wants to have us believe that this is a creepy, atmospherically shadowy place of horror, and it’s even sometimes good at this. The film’s best scene is very early, it’s first kill, in which the original lead actor, Oliver (George Clooney, making his feature acting debut, and this is the piece of casting that is the main reason most people who know about the movie know about it. I regret to say that, while Clooney would later develop dangerously intense amounts of screen presence, he’s not there yet) wanders into a hallway where he mostly exists as a silhouette against splashes of light. Like most of Return to Horror High, it’s pretty untethered from anything else, both for plot reasons (everybody thinks Oliver went off to shoot a TV pilot, so his absence is not noticed), and because the film is never again so deeply committed to being a potentially actually effective thriller. It gets too bogged down in meta-jokes and distancing effects (ignoring that Clooney playing “handsome guy who leaves to shoot a pilot so he doesn’t have to keep making shitty genre films” is a meta-joke, just not one that had a punchline yet in 1987), flagging too many of its genre thrills as as reconstructions and failing to make it clear what the stakes are even of the ones that aren’t.
Basically, if the whole point was to make a deliberately unsatisfying slasher, mission accomplished; and I don’t know that wasn’t the point, though I don’t respect it if it was. The film is mostly kind of annoying, between its broad comic gestures, its moral smugness, and the unexceptional filmmaking chops that entirely fail to earn the industry satire that it obviously cares about more than any other individual tendril. It’s a fascinating and boldly adventurous pile of slop, but you can only do so much to disguise a pile of slop.
Body Count: Uh… 8 death scenes have been staged.