Capsule Reviews: <i>Night School</i>

Capsule Reviews: Night School

Quick-hit movie reviews for the masses.

Night School—where all the exams are final!

Night School is an unfairly neglected 1981 slasher flick, full of off-kilter charm that makes for fun repeat viewing. The plot: A motorcycle-helmeted killer is slicing off the heads of pretty young coeds at an alarming rate, in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood. Everyone's just weird enough to be a suspect, and the final act's twist was fairly unique to the early days of the slasher craze.

The tone is moody, gritty, and bloody. Bahston never looked so eerily claustrophobic and creepy. In her film debut, an incandescent Rachel Ward, playing an intense anthropology student, is full of existential ennui and always on the verge of tears. In other words, she’s magnificent. The film's Drive-In totals are impressive: Machete fu, ritualistic shower sex fu, buckets of blood. Tweed jackets everywhere. Nobody ever seems to go to class. A smarmy college professor beds his students with regularity. A slimy college dean takes coeds back to her place for some half-naked extracurricular work. A stalker/peeping tom busboy gives Rachel Ward the heebie-jeebies. Tough-talking Bostonians everywhere you look. One motor vehicle chase. Multiple foot chases. No homework. Heads roll (literally). Head in a toilet. Head in a fish tank. At one point the detective investigating the murders (Leonard Mann) asks, exasperatedly, “What the hell was the head doing in the sink?!”

Brilliant. Check it out.

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