Blu-Ray Review: Graduation Day (1981)

Review by Tristan Bishop

The American school system was a very dangerous place in the eighties. Forget the over-emphasis on sports scholarship, the rife bullying of nerds and the horrendous idea of having to find a date for the prom (I’m glad we never had to do that in the UK) – the worst aspect of school/college in the States was undoubtedly the abundance of psycho killers slicing and dicing their way through the student body. At least that’s how it seemed, of course. After the influential, yet slow-burn success that was Black Christmas (1974), Halloween (1978) exploded the teen slasher movie into the mainstream, and by the early eighties we were literally swimming in genre films featuring young people getting picked off one-by-one. Of course we reached critical mass fairly quickly, and the genre started to die off by 1985 – the occasional resurrection such as Scream (1996) or Sorority Row (2009) being the exception. However, for a few glorious years the slasher was king, and now the world of HD is catching up, as more and more vintage horror films are being given BD releases. And not just the acknowledged classics either; films which have long been regarded as second-tier are being given a new lease of life, and Graduation Day fits that description perfectly.

The credit sequence is certainly impressive, using some cracking disco music (from a long-forgotten band called Felony) and arresting, rhythmic editing to portray a tragic occurrence at a school track race – whilst her coach and team-mates cheer her on, a girl called Laura (Ruth Ann Llorens) takes the first place yet collapses and dies. Flash forward to months later, just before Graduation Day, and Laura’s sister Anne arrives in town as Laura is to be commemorated during the graduation ceremony. Anne is in the Navy and is a bit of a hard-ass, thinking nothing of grabbing and twisting the crotch of a sleazy van driver who gives her a lift. Soon after she is dropped off at her hometown she tries to get the attention of a girl who was in Laura’s track team. The girl doesn’t hear her, however, as she is jogging with her Walkman on. But it turns out someone is following the jogger, someone dressed in grey sweats and black gloves, and sure enough some POV camera precedes one of the least convincing throat-slashings in the history of the slasher film.

When Anne gets back to her family home (cue dysfunctional stepfather relations) she unpacks her bags to reveal (shock horror) a grey sweatsuit and some black gloves! However, as we soon realise, she isn’t the only person in town to own this particular outfit; there’s also the pushy and soon-to-be-out-of-a-job sports coach, who wears this outfit constantly. And sure enough the murders pile up as someone seems to be making their way through Laura’s track team. Is it Anne seeking her revenge? Is Coach Michaels (star turn by Christopher George) attempting to cover up his unorthodox methods? Or could it be the short-tempered principal (B-grade horror regular Michael Pataki)? Or could it be someone else entirely?

As previously mentioned, Graduation Day never made it into many people’s top ten horror film lists; in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find it on many people’s top ten eighties teen slasher film lists, but does that mean it’s a bad film? Actually, this is far from a bad film. Admittedly there are a fair few faults here – some of the murders are pitiful, with the aforementioned throat-slitting looking particularly pathetic in HD, although some of the later deaths are actually pretty entertaining, as the killer is revealed to be wearing a fencing mask and carrying a rather sharp blade to pull off the carnage with. Sadly, however, someone dressed in fencing gear doesn’t quite have the same terrifying presence as, say, a Michael Myers or a Jason Voorhees, so the scare factor of this film is pretty much non-existent.

However, this is balanced by the film’s good points – an entertaining script (with a surprisingly large amount of characters for a film of this nature) and professional actors giving solid performances throughout. We even get an early appearance by Linnea Quigley as, well, a high school girl who thinks nothing of smoking weed on school grounds, seducing teachers for better grades, and, you guessed it, taking her top off (can’t have an eighties teen slasher without boobs after all). When faced with all this the actual stalking-and-slashing takes back seat and we’re left with something more akin to a whodunit than a gore flick. Yes, there are false trails and red herrings aplenty, and many interesting avenues are left unexplored, but Graduation Day kept me entertained and guessing throughout.

Should we now be re-evaluating Graduation Day and giving it a top place in the pantheon of slasher greats? Probably not. But for those with a nostalgic yearning for the days when hair was permed and knives were bloody (or even for those too young to remember first time around), this BD release from 88 films is a must-have.

The extras on this release all come from Troma’s US release – so we get an intro by Lloyd Kaufman, an interview with Quigley, a feature length documentary on scream queens (I didn’t bother)* and, er, the Cannibal Lesbian Hoedown music video directed by Kaufman himself. Personally I would have liked a more detailed look at the film itself (or even a general doc on 80’s slashers) but you can’t argue that there’s plenty of extra content here.

Incidentally director Herb Freed (also responsible for the eerie 70’s chiller Haunts) was a rabbi, singer and folk dancer before becoming a director. Now there’s a man in need of a Wikipedia page.

(* Editor’s note – the documentary Scream Queens: Horror Heroines Exposed is actually an all-new exclusive documentary from High Rising, the team behind Slice & Dice: the Slasher Film Forever.)

Graduation Day is out now on UK Blu-Ray from 88 Films.