Classic Review: Graduation Day

Another classic review from Alec Cizak that originally appeared at Let's Kill Everybody! This time he skewers one of the most laughable slashers every made, Graduation Day.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 2011

Graduation Day (1981)

by Alec "Foiled Rotten" Cizak

The class of the slasher genre emerged in 1981. Not that these movies were that great or classy. They were among the last “spam in a cabin” flicks, as Joe Bob Briggs once referred to them, to uphold some basic tenets of late ‘70s/very early ‘80s subversive cinema. In the case of the slasher, the youngsters represented the Other. This was reinforced any time an adult was present. Adults and especially authority figures, such as police or deans or politicians, were generally safe from the killer because they represented the old order, which was threatened by the new order. There are numerous essays and books that attempt to explain other aspects of the genre. Most of them focus on the idea that sexual activity was the prime cause for the kids being punished. If you watch the majority of the slashers released in 1980 and 1981, which unfortunately, I have, it’s obvious that this wasn’t really true across the board. Terror Train, for example, came the closest to proving the gender critics’ theory about the old switcheroo taking place between the killer and the final girl (i.e., the killer is effeminate, the final girl is masculine). But even Terror Train doesn’t dwell on the notion that sex will get you killed. Jamie Lee Curtis does not play a “virginal-type” in Terror Train or Prom Night. I would go so far as to argue that her character in Halloween is not all that pure either. She smokes a joint, after all, on the way to her babysitting gig.

But I digress. You’ll notice throughout this piece that I digress frequently. I’m a digresser. Things might be different were I reviewing any other movie.

The slasher genre was already dying by 1981. It was clear that no filmmaker trying to cash in on Halloween’s success understood why John Carpenter’s template worked. A few films got the suspense part, but failed to create any characters worth caring about, so that when the characters got killed, the audience’s emotional response was hinged to the cleverness of the murder or the believability of the gore (which was not a part of Halloween). By 1981, the genre was subjected to “deconstructionist” experiments, such as The Burning and Slumber Party Massacre. And the genre was ready to be outright spoofed. Student Bodies was an example of a film removing any remaining elements of horror and suspense and demonstrating that the genre had become a joke. Quite by accident, ex-rabbi Herb Freed co-wrote, co-produced and directed the silliest slasher ever made, Graduation Day. The title, thus, is more appropriate than Freed might have intended. Graduation Day marked the end of any possibility of taking the genre seriously. After 1981, very few slashers were worth watching, let alone discussing in any critical manner.

Graduation Day is bad. It approaches Ed Wood-bad. Throughout the film, a flash-editing technique is employed to no dramatic effect at all. The result is annoying. The opening sequence is a great example of this. The event from the past that will cause the eventual stalk and slaughter of teenagers occurs amidst a flurry of flash cuts between a track meet, the track coach, and the crowd in the bleachers. Most of this is set to a disco song called “Everybody Wants to be a Winner,” which is appropriate considering everybody who imitated Halloween did so not out of respect for the style John Carpenter employed, but the profits the film earned. The winner of the track meet drops dead at the finish line, which is also appropriate, and off we go on an adventure of cinematic incompetence that’s not even coherent enough to warrant the ridicule of an audience at a midnight movie.

Things are suspect right away. Paula, the eventual final girl who spends the majority of the film off-screen, has hitch-hiked with a truck driver wearing a purple shirt and yellow ascot. The driver tries to feel her up, tells her he has “enough tongue” for the both of them, and then accuses her of being a “lesbo” when she refuses. She is set up as the first red-herring when she gets out and walks through a forest where the first killing will take place. The killer uses a stop-watch to commemorate the confusing track meet from the beginning of the film. The first victim, like everyone who is actually murdered in the film, is an anonymous member of the track team the audience is never allowed to get to know and generate sympathy for. The coach is then set up as another red-herring in one of many terrible musical sequences in the film. As he walks across campus, we get a "meet the crazy kids!" montage cross-cut to a heavy metal tune called, for absolutely no logical reason, “Lucky Strike.” Oh, yeah: half the “crazy kids” we meet have nothing to do with the film’s alleged plot.

Crammed in among all the nonsense and moronic killings (after the first victim, the killer, for no apparent reason, adopts a fencing foil as his or her weapon of choice), we manage to learn that a character named Kevin, who looks like he’s thirty-five-years-old and belongs in a Lord of the Rings movie, was in love with Laura, the girl who dropped dead at the track meet in the beginning of the film. So much for red-herrings. So much, also, for the film maintaining its rep as a piece of subversive cinema. The moment the killer in a slasher turns out to be one of the “crazy kids,” the notion of the teenagers being the Other is pretty much snuffed.

One could write a book on the disjointed elements of Graduation Day—there is an inexplicable acoustic “jam” in the middle of the movie. Some guy who has nothing to do with the other characters cross-breeds Elvis and T. Rex for a god-awful performance of a god-awful song called “Graduation Day Blues.” Most notable is the eventual killer singing back up and “jamming” along with a harmonica. Then there is the most notorious musical number in the film—some horrific New Wave band called Felony plays a song called “Gangster Rock” for seven and a half minutes. By the time it’s over, the song’s annoying refrain is stuck in your head for the rest of the movie. Finally, the film’s most memorable line of dialogue is uttered near the end when a detective who is barely connected to the plot asks the final girl, Paula, “Who are you? What’s your stake in all this?” It’s a question that could be presented to every character in the movie.

But I digress. Again.

It’s my job to extract some sort of meaning from this mess, to come up with a clever take that suggests there is more going on than just an embarrassing narrative failure that still managed to rake in nearly twenty-four million dollars. It took me three miserable viewings to figure out what’s really going on in Graduation Day. Then, of course, in a half-waking state, I realized that the gold nugget of wisdom Graduation Day offers is this:

Life ends after high school.

For most of the conformist, yuppie clones that litter the American landscape, nothing could be more true. High school is it. Life never gets more glorious than scoring a winning touchdown on Friday night or “finger-banging old Mary Jane Rottencrotch through her purty pink panties” in the back of a beat up Chevy on a Saturday night. It’s no accident that the killer and victims in Graduation Day are athletes (save Linnea Quigley, who gets killed simply because she showed her famous tits to her music teacher. But I digress). These are the shining jewels of every high school, and in most cases, as we all know, they go on to get married; work mindless, routine office jobs; put their fluids together to pump out one or two replacement clones and die without ever having established any meaning to their lives. Depressing? Of course. That’s why God invented suicide. But they don’t even have the guts to do that. So, enter Kevin, the goofy thirty-five-year-old with a goofier white-boy afro.

Herb Freed wants us to think Kevin is avenging the death of his true love, Laura. In fact, he is saving his classmates and teammates from entering the adult world and becoming one of the half-dozen jaded, corrupt, dishonest authority figures lurking in and around the high school. Folks like the music teacher, who dresses like Jerry Lewis, talks like Liberace and bangs young girls “just like the old man in that book by Nabokov.” Folks like the principal and his secretary (played by a healthy, pre-bulimia Vanna White), who banter back and forth about doing work, particularly the bothersome task of explaining to parents where their children might have gone off to, before agreeing to meet up later to drink and screw. The worst kind of adult these kids can become (and a great many athletes do, in fact, become) is a law enforcement officer. The school cop is a smarmy fuck who threatens to throw the kiddies in jail for smoking weed before lighting up a joint for himself (read: Adults are hypocrites). The detective who shows up late in the movie to look for the students who have been murdered is the worst of them all. He has no interest in doing his job. When asked where his badge is, he shrugs and says, “Must have lost it.” And he harbors no illusions about his feelings towards the youth (thus, the Other) when he tells the principal, “I hate schools.”

The one adult the movie tries to set up for a ninth-inning Gatorade shower of sympathy is the track coach. The film fails, however, for several reasons. The coach is a red-herring right up until the very end. Also, he’s played by the bad guy from El Dorado, Christopher George (who ended his career pretty much the same way Bela Lugosi did, in one bad horror movie after another), who looks like a mean old fuck even when he’s smiling.

Nope. There’s nothing attractive about growing up and becoming “mature.” Adults are just teenagers who are allowed to get away with their bad behavior. The message of Graduation Day is difficult to find, but it’s there:

Trust no one over the age of twenty.

Halloween established, among many other conventions of the slasher genre, the contempt for authority. When Annie’s (Nancy Loomis) father fails to recognize the stench of marijuana in his daughter’s car, the audience knows he’s useless. When he blames the break in at the hardware store on teenagers, the audience knows he’s an enemy. Like most so-called conventions of the slasher genre, this element is used and abandoned throughout the canon of films that picked up the loose dollars Halloween left in its wake. Friday the 13th opens with a truck driver who won’t take a camp counselor all the way to Crystal Lake. That allows Mrs. Voorhees to pick up the unlucky gal and slit her throat in the forest. Like most slasher conventions, the contempt for authority gets twisted around in movies such as Terror Train, where the authority figure is a senior citizen whose demeanor is so friendly the audience can’t help but sympathize with him. This, of course, ruins the convention as it was originally intended. Some films incorporate authority into the band of kids being stalked, an example being The Prowler. The point here, before I digress again, is that the conventions of slasher films, as they have been defined by critics and theorists, are barely conventions since they don’t play out the same way on a consistent basis from film to film.

Graduation Day, however, bears the honor of taking the useless, corrupt authority figure to a campy, inept extreme. The film’s cynical portrayal of all adults is, in fact, its only redeeming feature.

Classic Review: THE BURNING

This is the first in a series of classic reviews by Alec Cizak, which originally appeared at Let's Kill Everybody! In this review, Cizak disappoints everybody by shitting on fan favorite The Burning.

MONDAY, MAY 2, 2011

The Burning (1981)

by Alec "Just kill me when it's over" Cizak

I realize The Burning has a cult following that adores it. It features good special-effects make-up work by Tom Savini. It’s notable for its cast, which includes Jason Alexander and Holly Hunter (not to mention Brian Backer, who went on to channel Paul Simon and Woody Allen in Fast Times at Ridgemont High). The truth of the matter is that it is not a very good slasher. At all. I would go so far as to say that the writers and producers tried to get "clever" with the genre, possibly even attempting to “deconstruct” it while the genre was in its prime.

As much as I loathe and despise “deconstructionism,” I can set my personal feelings aside as “deconstructionism,” with respect to horror films, rarely, if ever, works. While Scream made a lot of money at the box office and started a trend of slick, studio-produced "post-modern" slashers in the late 1990s, purists pretty much agree those movies suck shit out of a donkey’s ass with a straw. Sarah Trencansky backs this view up in her article, “Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror.” Trencansky uses a lot of later examples, i.e., A Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser, to make the case that 1980s horror movies are subversive in nature (the teenagers representing "the Other") and the polished, nauseating "post-modern" films of the 1990s are more restorative than disruptive of the “dominant culture.” I agree with Trencasky, though I think the movies she’s really talking about, when discussing the 1980s, were made in 1980 and 1981. There are a few examples afterwards, but by 1982, more money is spent in order to make more money and that, by definition, takes the rug out from a low-budget film’s subversive nature. Further, I have a problem including films like A Nightmare on Elm Street in the canon of slasher films because the supernatural element separates those films from the bare-bones model of a human monster stalking young people (and the occasional impotent authority figure).

Okay, so maybe I’m kind of a low-budget snob. A slasher movie, to me, is filmed on a shoe-string budget. It has bare-breasts and buckets of blood. It has a soundtrack that places it firmly in the early 1980s, meaning synthesizers, and lots of ‘em! It appears right in that borderland period between the excessive freedom of the Carter administration and the repressive, deadly clampdown (thank you, The Clash) that occurred when Reagan and Bush took over (remember that Reagan doesn’t take office until 1981, giving the country a year or two to adjust to his oppressive, murderous regime, thus, making the appearance of Rambo and Rocky IV, two films Robert Kolker uses to describe how the clock was suddenly turned back to Cold War paranoia, inevitable; I would go so far as to argue that the “puritanical” aspects of the slasher film were not brought to forefront of the genre until Reagan thoroughly took over--but that’s another article for another time...)

The Burning appears during this time. 1981, which was, in my opinion, the high-point for the slasher genre. The Burning was the first effort by the Weinstein Brothers. That makes quite a bit of sense. They were also responsible for letting Wes Craven unload Scream on a thoroughly impotent 1990s audience of teenagers who had been conditioned to believe that self-consciousness was/is “clever.” It’s not. The Burning proves this.

The film starts off great. A group of teenagers at camp play a horrible prank on the camp’s caretaker. It’s an early example of Reagan-era conformity-fever. The guy is different, so he needs to be punished. The prank--surprise--goes bad, and the weirdo gets engulfed in flames. He survives and is released from the burn ward, horribly disfigured, five years later. In a scene that seems out of place, the pissed off, permanently barbecued caretaker follows a middle-aged hooker up to her room and kills her. Feminist critics have used this scene as an example of the genre’s misogyny towards older women as the hooker looks hideous as she realizes she’s let a freak into her apartment. It’s possible. The truth, I think, is that it’s just a cheap way to set up the reality that the man is going to be a permanent outsider and justifies his exacting revenge on a new batch of campers. Another possibility is that the producers realized how much time passes between the establishment of the campers and the first real killing and stuck the scene in after principal photography wrapped.

What follows is about a forty-five minute rehash of Meatballs. We meet the jokers, the outcast, the suspiciously Aryan-looking bully, the girls, and the camp counselor who--surprise--was one of the little pricks who caused our killer to get burned up five years previous. Noting the obvious ethnic differences between the Ayran bully and the “good” kids and Brian Hacker’s “weirdo” who--gasp--likes to look at naked girls, one begins to suspect the Weinstein brothers are going to use the slasher genre to make a statement about the holocaust. But that would have been too clever (and, I believe, would have fit the film right in with the anti-authoritarian purpose of other slashers being made at the time).

No, instead what follows is just an extended period of character development, which isn’t such a bad thing. It certainly collides with the hypersensitive criticism claiming the victims in slasher films aren’t likeable (that trend, again, evolved with Reagan’s turning the clock back and making individuality a social crime deserving of a machete to the skull). However, the producers simply take too long to get to the slashing. I’m of the Atari generation, so my attention span has not been completely eradicated. I can take story and character development. But in a slasher picture, you need to start carving the kiddies up a whole lot sooner.

When the killing does start, it’s not suspenseful. Tom Savini doesn’t get nearly as gruesome in this one as he does in the (my opinion, folks) vastly superior The Prowler. There is no Final Girl, which I believe takes away one of the genre’s most potent weapons of subversion--the woman who doesn’t need prince charming to save her. Instead, it’s two guys who are symbolically tied to the killer, one being the camp weirdo and the other being the counselor who was partially responsible for the killer’s shish kabob routine in the beginning of the film. There is a long, convoluted chase through what appears to be Civil War ruins (turns out to be a mill or something) and then an anti-climactic face off with the killer.

One element of the film that made me furious was the treatment of sex. While sex in other slashers appears to be “punished,” the kids at least have a good time while they’re doing it. Perhaps foreseeing the repressive Reagan age, the Weinstein brothers decided to make the sex in The Burning unfulfilling. The Aryan bully fails to satisfy his girlfriend and the experience is presented in such a way as to send a repressive message--Don’t have sex, you won’t enjoy it. I’m certain the producers thought they were “deconstructing” the sex in previous slasher films. All they really did was back the status quo, which during Reagan’s regime, was highly represented by the uptight Christian “right.”

That scene alone puts The Burning in the right-wing camp and, by definition, thwarts any other attempt by the film to be radical and subversive. I find it shameful and refuse to recommend this movie to anybody who doesn’t first try to recommend the church to me...

A Nice Place to Slash!

Watching a film consumes anywhere from seventy-five minutes to three hours of your life.  Knowing you have a finite number of hours to live, why in the world would you ever watch the same film twice?  But certain movies beg us to come back.  Reasons vary, but for the filmmaker trying to make a movie that will be watched over the generations, one way to guarantee return trips from the same audience is atmosphere.

            Why did Blade Runner attract such a huge audience when it came out on video?  Critics (most of whom did not understand what they were watching and, by the way, most of whom have since recanted their initial assessments) bashed the movie when it showed up in summer, 1982.  There were severe problems—the voice-over and the sappy ending.  But when people had the opportunity to view it multiple times on VHS, the movie became a hit in spite of the damage done by paranoid studio executives and brain-dead movie critics (Leonard Maltin, by the way, sticks to his shitty review to this day.  Way to be stubborn and stupid, Leo!).  Why?  Atmosphere.  Blade Runner is a bleak, depressing story.  But Ridley Scott did such a fantastic job creating the environment the film takes place in that watching the movie again feels like actually going someplace familiar.  That’s the key to atmosphere.

            What the hell does that have to do with slashers?

            Good question.

            Blade Runner was released on the same day as John Carpenter’s The Thing.  Carpenter’s The Thing is widely considered the best horror film of the 1980s.  With good reason.  It’s a movie that stands up today, just as Blade Runner does (although some young people complain about the special effects—they have no appreciation for the artistry of in-camera effects; I’m not going to go into the whole ‘CGI sucks’ routine—anyone born before the year 1980 knows it and those born after have to live with the fact that their legacy in cinema is a batch of remakes and reboots made by computers with no soul at all.  Sucks to be them, but, by and large, it’s not the fault of the individual Gen Yers, it’s their collective inability to put a stop to the Hollywood machine that doesn’t give a shit about craftsmanship anymore).  Both Blade Runner and The Thing suffered because of Spielberg’s E.T. and the beginning, gradual shift from dark, introspective realism, to sunny, materialist, blind 1980s-optimism (which, admittedly, was fun while it lasted).  What’s important to note is that both Ridley Scott and John Carpenter understood atmosphere.

       We can move, then, to the subject of slashers.  Carpenter was heavily influence by Howard Hawkes.  Ever noticed how the movie Rio Bravo never gets old?  Hawkes was a master of creating atmosphere (Big Sleep, anyone?).  Carpenter managed to make Pasadena and a street just off of Sunset Boulevard look like a small, midwestern town in Halloween.  During his reign as king of the big(ger) budget b-movies, he directed and/or produced a string of movies that hold up today simply because of his mastery of atmosphere (of which, oh by the way, music plays a big role—an aspect Carpenter saw to himself).  Any time Escape from New York is on AMC, I stop and watch the whole damn movie.  I’ve seen it a dozen times.  I love the end, I think it’s a great piece of nihilism that modern, ninnified America would never tolerate today, but what glues me to the movie is the attention paid to the environment depicted in the film and the music.  The main ingredients for atmosphere.  Even when Carpenter was only a producer (Halloween II and III), his imprint is still obvious and, as mediocre as those films are, they are still re-watchable.

            So, on to the subject of slashers.

            When the slasher boom took off in late 1980 and 1981, the filmmakers responsible were desperate to figure out what ingredient they needed to steal from Carpenter’s Halloween in effort to make a similar film.  Some of them got the suspense right (The Prowler), some of them understood the necessary makeup of the characters (teeny boppers or college students), but the best took all those elements and added atmosphere.

      Think about the original Friday the 13^th—what do you hear?  The goofy k-k-k-ma-ma-ma motif and the whooping cranes (or whatever bird it is) heard throughout all the daylight scenes.  The film made excellent use of its forest location.  When I watch that movie again, I am taken back to summertime in the late 70s and early 80s.  Whether intended or not, the movie does a great job creating atmosphere appropriate for the eventual slaughter that takes place.

            The king of the Halloween rip-offs, in terms of atmosphere, however, is the original My Bloody

Valentine.  I love this movie.  The killer is absolutely awesome.  The best in any of the golden age (post-Halloween) slashers.  The producers veered away from the other slashers in the very important aspect of economics—the characters in My Bloody Valentine are blue collar, a little bit older, and therefore, I believe, more sympathetic.  The director did a fantastic job of creating the fictitious town the story takes place in.  The night scenes are drenched in eerie, blue light and smoke.  It’s actually not a very scary film—not a lot of suspense is used and the ending is a little goofy.  But none of that matters.  I go back and watch My Bloody Valentine once a year because, like all films that do a good job with atmosphere, it’s like visiting somewhere familiar, seeing familiar people (who, unfortunately, get chopped into little bits and pieces), it’s like a small, hour and a half vacation. 

            Exactly what a movie is supposed to be.