Massacre at Central High (1976)

The title of this movie is deceptive. It is neither a horror film nor a teensploitation slasher flick. It is basically an allegorical drama which proposes some very serious underlying sociological theories, ala Lord of the Flies.  In fact, the film could easily be summed up as "Lord of the Flies in the suburbs." Although most of it takes place in a high school, and all of it involves the interactions of high school society, the high school has no visible teachers or administrators, and the students have no visible families. The high school itself is a neo-classical building fronted by enormous Corinthian columns, and looks more like the kind of building that would be called "the hall of justice." The students can and do set all their own rules in this metaphorical society.

A "lone wolf" newcomer arrives in a California high school and fails to assimilate. He gets along poorly with the bullies, and actually ends up roughing a few of them up when he breaks up their attempted gang rape. Needless to say, they do not react well to this, and retaliate by ganging up on him and causing a serious accident which leaves him with a partially shattered leg, and a limp for the rest of his life. This, of course, calls for counter-retaliation, and all the bully boys are soon to die in nasty ways.  (My personal favorite was the kid who was electrocuted while hang gliding. A tip o' the hat to the stunt man for a great gig in the kite on the power wires.)

Now we get to the serious philosophy. You might think that once the lone wolf has liberated the school from the thugs, everyone else would join together in a new spirit of sharing, but such is not the case. The euphoria of freedom and co-operation is soon replaced by a splintering of the student body into various cliques, all of which compete to fill in the power vacuum left by the deaths of the bullies, with the winners to become the new bullies.

The lone wolf sees that all of his perfectly good murders have been for naught, so he promptly embarks upon a new campaign of violence, which will culminate in his blowing up the entire school during a big dance -  unless he can be stopped by the one girl who can melt his hard heart.

This is an interesting premise, but the film doesn't quite live up to the promise of its concept. The film quality is poor, a dark and grainy master to begin with, further polluted by a transfer which is corrupted by motion blur, and which seems to have been cobbled together from many different sources, all with different signs of aging. Moreover, the acting is so poor as to break the fourth wall from time to time.

Still, it is an interesting idea, and although we all hate remakes, this one might it might make for an excellent candidate to be re-shot with a decent budget and professional production values. It also would be a good candidate for a cleaned-up and re-mastered DVD from

There is some interesting nudity. B-movie legend Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith shows all the goods; Lani O'Grady (the oldest daughter on Eight is Enough) appears topless; and Kimberly Beck shows her breasts and buns in some incredibly dark nighttime action.

Smith and O'Grady each died young from drug-related causes.

• Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith died in 2002, aged 47, of hepatitis, which was basically a complication of her heroin addiction.
• Lani O'Grady (real name Lanita Rose Agrati) died a year earlier, aged 46. According to toxicology tests, she died of a drug overdose, she had fatal levels of Vicodin and Prozac in her bloodstream. Those were just her latest forms of self-medication. She had been in rehab about a half-dozen times for both alcohol and various drugs.

Here's a film clip of the movie's only nude scene which is in good light (zipped .wmv). Smith and O'Grady wander around in various degrees of undress, then repair to a tent for a three-way with Robert Carradine.

I used some of Mr. Skin's caps because his source was better than this DVD in a couple of scenes, while the DVD seemed to be better elsewhere, which seems to confirm my suspicion that the DVD was spliced together from multiple sources.

 

Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith

Lani O'Grady

Kimberly Beck

OTHER CRAP:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

Vice Academy (1988)

Vice Academy is a B-level raunchy comedy, but it has less nudity than is typical for this type of film. It is tempting to say that it's "Police Academy but with more bimbos and a little T&A," but the actual inspiration for the film was the introductory segment of Charlie's Angels, where the announcer intones that the angels all graduated from a police academy. Writer/Director Rick Sloan began to wonder what such an academy might be like - with classes on cheap make-up, hooker impersonation, etc.

The premise is that the students at this academy need to make 10 busts to graduate, so our three first infiltrate a kiddie porn company, then go after the biggest prostitution ring in Hollywood. Karen Russell, Linnea Quigley and Ken Abraham play the three misfits in the Vice Academy class, and they are pitted against the obnoxious instructor (Jane Hamil), and the prissy daughter of the police chief, played by Ginger Lynn Allen, who was then trying to transition from hardcore sex films into the mainstream.

This is no Citizen Kane in general, or even a Police Academy. It's rated 3.6 at IMDb. On the other hand, some of the jokes worked well enough that the film became a staple of late night cable, and eventually initiated an enduring franchise for Rick Sloan. When he made this first one, he never suspected that it would become a series, but there have been six of them so far.

 I will give it a C-.

 

Karen Russell

Linnea Quigley

Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom

In case the title didn't give it away, this 1973 action/sexploitation flick is part of The Pinky Violence Collection of Japanese films of that era with plenty of sex, violence, nudity, torture, and campy stories.

Three new students are sent to the School of Hope, a strict girl's school run by a tyrannical administration, and enforced by the Disciplinary Committee, a group of students whose idea of discipline is to kick everyone's ass.

One of the new students is there to get revenge for the killing of her friend, who was tortured to death by the Disciplinary Committee, and together with the other two newcomers, and a Yakuza biker chick, and a blackmailer, they set up the head of the school by involving him in sex with some of the students. This then leads to a riot where the students destroy the school.

It's an insane movie, totally improbable and often not making a lot of sense, but it's also a lot of fun to watch, and damn, they didn't have girls like this in my school.

Miki Sugimoto

Notes and collages

Alberta Watson in Destiny to Order

A few more of Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith - Video Vixens

A few more of Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith - Slumber Party '57

A few more of Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith - Revenge of the Cheerleaders

A few more of Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith - Fantasm Comes Again

Helena Bonham Carter - Conversations with Other Women

Nora Zehetner - Conversations with Other Women

Marina Eich - "24/7"

Tanith Fiedler - The Wedding Slashers

People reports that Denise Richards was shooting a movie with Pamela Anderson in a Vancouver suburb when Richards spotted two paparazzi who've harassed her before.  She reportedly grabbed their laptops and threw them over a hotel balcony.  One struck the arm of an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair on the balcony below.  The Mounties and an ambulance were called, but a spokesman for the movie insisted that the woman wasn't seriously hurt, the ambulance was routine, she's not interested in pressing charges, and it's been 'blown way out of proportion."  The movie Richards is making is a "Dumb & Dumber" knock-off called "Blonde & Blonder."

*  The movie's spokesman went on to explain that dropping a laptop from a balcony onto an elderly woman in a wheelchair sounds much worse than it really is.