Una por una

AKA One by One. For the first hour The Majorettes plays like a very typical, mediocre 1980's slasher movie. We get teenage girls stripping off in the locker room, a creepy, pervert school janitor and a killer who likes to slash victims throats. But then the boyfriend of one of the female victims goes on a one man crusade against a redneck, drug dealing biker gang in an hilarious gun fight with completely over the top sound effects! And then the plot goes back to the killer, I'm not giving away spoilers but it had me laughing. Brought to us by writer John Russo and directed by Bill Hinzman, both of Night of the Living Dead (1968) fame, this is a real oddball slasher movie, I found it quite amusing but for the wrong reasons. The British VHS release was heavily cut, best avoided.

Hey … what's with all the harsh and negative reviews on "The Majorettes"? I watched this movie before checking out what people thought or even taking a glimpse at the rating and thought it was a surprisingly enjoyable film! I was convinced it would have some loyal fans among the reviewers, but strangely enough practically all comments are discouraging others to see it. Well then allow me to be one of the only souls on the Internet promoting this eighties action/horror oddity!

Avid and knowledgeable fans of the genre will immediately recognize two of the displayed names in the opening credits of "The Majorettes"; i.e. John Russo and Bill Hinzman. Both these gentlemen played fundamental roles in the establishment of one of the greatest milestones in cinema of all time; George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". Russo was the co-writer and Hinzman played the legendary cemetery zombie with whom the invasion of the dead all begun. They went onwards with lesser successful careers in the 80's (Russo wrote and directed the obscure "Midnight" and Hinzman put together the dreadful "Flesheater"), but "The Majorettes" was their mini-reunion!

That being said, "The Majorettes" opens exactly like you expect an 80's horror movie with such a lurid title to start! With a posse of chicks in tight gym suits doing aerobics to the tunes of dreadful pop music and then collectively stripping nude to hit the showers. So far so good, I'd say… After that it's getting even more typically 80's with voyeuristic janitors, love-making couples getting slashed in the backwoods and harsh bullying all within a span of five minutes! "The Majorettes" can overall be filed in the slasher cabinet, but there's certainly more than meets the eye. The plot is reasonably ambitious and there are some clear attempts to generate tension and atmosphere in between all the gratuitous nudity and brutal gore. A vicious killer dressed in a military camouflage outfit goes around slitting the throats of high school majorettes. The local drug dealer and boyfriend of the first victim is the main suspect, but it seems that the real killer has much more religious motivations for his killing spree.

I spent quite a number of years looking for "The Majorettes" before finding it on a DVD-compilation along with "Hell High" and "Hitcher in the Dark". I have no idea why it's so relatively obscure, as it really isn't any worse than the vast majority of 80's stalk & slash movies. Quite the contrary, at least this movie tries to insert some significant twists and additional story lines. It's a mishmash of obvious red herrings and genuinely inventive plot twists. The whodunit factor is reasonably well-structured and effectively keeps you guessing along. The teen characters are also surprisingly likable and not at all the stereotypical bimbo-dimwits you anticipate to encounter in this sort of films. The acting is adequate (the copper with the mustache not included), there's plenty of excitement and the special effects are pretty cool. As far as yours truly is concerned, "The Majorettes" is one of the slasher-sleepers of the decade and urgently needs a fan base!

PS: Keep an eye open for the sequences with the grandmother! She looks as she had no idea she was on a film set!

It's not even a good movie. To many standards, this would be considered a bad movie, bordering on awful. But it's intention was B-horror, so what can you really say? To be fair, my review is a tad biased, since I've been reading a book called "Making Movies" by John Russo, the writer of the screenplay and the novel. He discusses the making of this movie in several chapters, and hence I became hugely interested in checking out this obscure horror flick. So I bought a copy of the video on Amazon.com for a cheap price, eager to add it to my collection. I always enjoy (being an avid video/DVD collector) having movies in my collection that virtually no one has heard about. Hell, there are people out there who aren't avid video/DVD collectors who have movies like "Gladiator" and "Independence Day" in their collections. So I don't want to jump on the bandwagon. Besides, I'm always curious (outside the collection circle) about obscure independent and low-budget films. So the minute I received "The Majorettes" in the mail, I was more than psyched to watched it right away.

Needless to say, this is a truly amateurish work. The dialogue is horrible and the acting is even worse. The film itself isn't very well made, but the atrocious acting was so bad that it distracted me from the cheesy aesthetics. But at least I got some laughs out the deal, though unintentional. The death scenes were poorly edited. They were edited somewhat like a R-rated movie edited for television, cutting mostly to close-ups and medium shots of the killer, until we finally cut to the knife being slashed across the victim's neck. Then we see a little blood. That's the only gore we see, and I'm sure that's due to poor production values. We basically just see the victims drenched in blood, to let it be self-explanatory that the victims got stabbed in other places. But the only effect the director was able to pull off was the neck-slashing.

The plot is flimsy, full of way-too-obvious red herrings (the evil nurse, the creepy janitor, the fanatical priest--just to name a few), and when we finally discover who the killer is, we don't have a clue as to what his/her motive was. It's basically just thrown in there to have the audience go, "Wow! I had no clue he/she was the killer!" I was definitely surprised to find out who the real killer was. I just didn't think it made much sense. And towards the third act, the plot meanders, totally abandoning the majorette-killer premise and seguing into another subplot.

So I have a lot of bad things to say, regarding to how this movie was made. Who wouldn't? I think a better approach would've been camp horror, rather than serious horror. But I got enough laughs from the bad acting (the actors literally never change expression and sound more like they're running through a first read-through) and didn't really need the actors to wink at me and confirm that they're in on the joke. Nevertheless, it has a certain so-bad-it's-good quality. It's like a train wreck. It's really bad, but you just want to see what happens and who gets out alive. I ain't gonna lie, this movie really interested me, in the way that monster movies used to interest audiences back in the 50's. So if you're looking for fun, B-movie entertainment--then I would recommend checking it out. But there's one other minor criticism I have to let out: the lack of gratuitous nudity. There is nudity in the film, but it's not exploitative. If this were a first-rate, or even second-rate, film that would be a good thing. Basically, you see the sides of the girls' breasts, but rarely do we see frontal nudity. Call me a perv, but if you're gonna make a bad B-movie, you may as well thrown in a ton of nudity. It's not like feminists are gonna be watching this!

My score: 5 (out of 10)

If you're an avid fan of George Romero's 'living dead' series then you might recognise the name Bill Hinzman: he played the graveyard zombie who attacked Barbara at the beginning of Night of the Living Dead. After several negligible roles in other Romero movies and assorted jobs behind the scenes, Hinzman decided to have a bash at directing, his first effort being this tawdry slasher/revenge flick based on a novel by John Russo (who also provided the screenplay).

Opening with a gloriously tacky opening credits scene showing a group of sexy, lycra wearing babes (most of whom look a bit too old to still be in high school) busting some moves, closely followed by a shower scene during which we see the pervy school janitor taking snapshots of the girls through a ventilation grille, the film certainly starts promisingly—heavy on the 80s cheeze and sleaze, it looks set to be a blast. Sadly, even though the gratuitous nudity continues throughout, and is accompanied by plenty of violence (but not much in the way of decent gore), the sense of fun soon wears off thanks to the truly awful performances (the girls certainly weren't hired for their acting ability), Russo's woeful script, and Hinzman's uninspired direction which only goes to prove that lurching around like a drooling ghoul in front of the camera is a darn sight easier than calling the shots behind it.

4.5 out of 10, generously rounded up to 5 for the silly-but-bloody OTT Peckinpah-style shootout at the end.

Come for the slashing. Stay for the big hair and random machine gun shootouts. The Majorettes might not be great art, but you can't say it's a movie where you know where it's going 5 minutes in. You might think you do, but trust me, you don't. Whether it works or not as a moot point, because The Majorettes takes you on a ride. Those expecting a straight up slasher/whodunit might start to twiddle their thumbs, but if you keep an open mind and just embrace all the film has to offer, you might enjoy it.