SPLATTER UNIVERSITY
The end is nigh...and then I'll have to plunder another store
All those movies in the horror section, and there's only five left. Five movies that, for some reason or another, I've put off seeing until I could no longer possibly avoid it. (oh sure, I could just not rent them at all and be satisfied with that, but what am I gonna bitch about then?) Five movies which come with impossibly low expectations. Five movies which, for months, have stared out at me from the shelf and whispered "C'mon, Brian. We dare ya."
At last, I take that dare. Bad-lookin' movies, your day has come.
So why'd I leave this one near last, you might ask. One word, gentlemen: Troma. More consistently than a stopped watch, Troma has failed to satisfy me on even the most base, moronic level I'm capable of descending to - and while this may be self-flattery, I like to think I can descend pretty low. Worse yet, a Troma film without mutants, mutants being basically Troma's only reason to exist. So the question is this: could this movie possibly be any better than repeatedly stabbing myself in the left testicle with a steak knife?
The plot - which can basically be extrapolated from the title alone - has an escaped mental patient killing one of his keepers and a University professor. So next semester, when she's replaced, a new group of students provides the required body count.
Slash action is actually quite sparse until the second half - the first half of the movie basically establishes this replacement and a bunch of variably irritating students. The "R-Rated Version" notice on the back of the box does not bode well, although it might explain how one girl is killed by a slash across the forehead. Many of the killings are - ahem - butchered similarly, though I don't mean to suggest that this would exactly be a humdinger of a cinematic experience if they were restored.
The foley guy should be ashamed of himself for using the same birdcall about two dozen times in this movie. Acting is terrible all around, as expected, and the characters reach new heights of irritatingness. In true Howling 7 non-style, half the characters are named after the actors who play them. And was there a point to this whole "abortion" thing? Two subplots revolve around the topic. If somebody was trying to say something, I ain't hearing it.
Still, it moved relatively quickly (and at 78 minutes, it's pretty brief). There was a lot of blood every time a body was discovered, no matter how badly cut the murders themselves were. And I have to admit to some satisfaction with the death of a certain lead character at the conclusion. It's just not something you see a lot of.
Better than repeatedly stabbing myself in the left testicle with a steak knife? Oh, yeah. I mean, c'mon, stabbing myself in a testicle sounds fuckin' painful! This was just bad. But it wasn't...I mean, ow!