Student Bodies

Before "Scary Movie" decided to spoof the slasher genre, the 80s had its very own send-up called "Student Bodies". It came quite early you might add, even before the sub-genre had completely hit it off. Anyhow despite that, we know where the ammo for this fun is coming from. "Halloween" and "Black Christmas" comes to mind. Quite variable, but this cheeky and in bad-taste enterprise pokes fun at everything (no one… that's no one is safe), including itself which makes it enjoyably amusing as the typical stereotypes are turn upside down. The story is old-hat and a little tame, but the craziness of the situations makes it hard not to get a tickle out of it. The script holds an exceedingly self-knowing attitude, filled with smart-lipped dialogues and the humour is visually evident too. Slapstick bumbling (the murderer's weapon of choice is just ridiculous) to the humorous use of subtitles pointing out the obvious. The intro perfectly paints it ("I have the feeling this is the last time I baby sit"). Even the music score gets into the action. The apparent genre staples are turned into gags, because how blatant they are in a story's progression for things to work. Horny students, suspicious red herrings, virgin heroine and of course heavy breathing. Some gags are repeatedly used, some to good effect and others became a little tiring. After halfway through it was starting to wear a little thin, but then it breaks out even more insane revelations… one topped off by another. There are about three climaxes! The ending has a nice little homage to a horror classic… which you simply see coming. The performances are spot-on, aiming for a mock seriousness approach and it works with the kooky array of memorable characters like Malvert the janitor. A more than decent little slasher parody.

I didn't find it to be hilarious, but it is an amusing horror spoof; generally I've found horror comedies to be funnier than horror spoofs.

The movie starts by noting how many horror movies have been made recently, and that they've all made money. We see a shot of a house at night with ominous music, and a caption reading "Halloween." This fades out, and then fades back up with the caption "Friday the 13th," which fades out and is replaced by the caption "Jamie Lee Curtis' Birthday" (the movie doesn't say, but that is November 22). This is an early indicator of the cheap and silly humor of the movie.

A heavy breathing killer wearing black boots and green rubber gloves makes phone calls to the babysitter in the house. After she looks outside for a cat that turns out to be a meowing dog with gas, she leaves the door unlocked (a caption and arrow call additional attention to this fact). Her boyfriend shows up, he's turned on by something that should be a turnoff, but he leaves the room (this series of actions repeats throughout the movie). The killer enters the house, and picks from a collection of weapons under a rolltop desk: a gun, knife, noose, hatchet, pack of cigarettes, paperclip. He picks the silliest one, of course. The girl dies by the silly weapon, and the guy gets killed by suffocating in a large black trash bag (this MO repeats too; the weapon is always different, but always silly).

A number of people at the school wear the same things the killer does, making them suspects to the audience, who knows, but not to the police. In fact, I'm not sure there are police - the school itself seems to be in charge of investigating the murders. The one person in the movie that becomes a suspect to other characters is a virgin girl.

Lots and lots of silliness in the movie, too much to cover. Anyone that likes silly spoof movies is likely to find something to make them laugh here.

Whatever happened to the actor "The Stick"?

This film is a terrible classic. The acting is painful and the plot is thinner than cheap takeout soy sauce packets. But it is marvelously entertaining and succeeds as a wonderful parody of Halloween, Friday the 13th and many other horror slasher flicks in the early 1980s.

High School students are being killed off because they're having sex, everybody's a suspect as the breather, a witty and lovable killer who the camera only sees through gloves and shoes.

Have fun trying to recognise any actor as their careers went completely downhill after this disaster.

A fun date movie, seriously. If you enjoyed "Scary Movie," you should definitely see this film.

Part of me thinks that, if the ever-reputable Criterion Collection can put out a 2-disc special edition of crap like "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas," they certainly could throw a bone to a sharp-witted parody like "Student Bodies," which nails the genre better than the 3 "Scream"s (which eventually went down the route of self-parody anyway) and the 4 (and counting) "Scary Movie"s. So why, then, has this cover-all-bases send-up been relegated to a word-of-mouth cult item since its 1981 release? Distributor Paramount, which hit paydirt with "Friday the 13th" the year before (and its sequels in the years following), likely saw "Bodies" as an opportunity to take a satirical jab at a genre that really only "began" with the breakout success of John Carpenter's "Halloween" (1978). The result? A film so ahead of its time that the audience didn't know what to make of it--relatively goreless and sex-free (our killer offs his teen victims BEFORE they get a chance to score), "Student Bodies" approaches an "Airplane!"-style level of pull-all-stops humor (albeit on a shoestring budget) that remains surprisingly tasteful, even in the midst of cracks about necrophilia and a farting corpse. The opening 15 minutes alone stuffs in references to "Halloween," "When a Stranger Calls," "The Prowler," and even Dario Argento's gialli (our killer's gloved hands figure heavily into the plot); the filmmakers superimpose a helpful "body count" tally plus other deliciously obvious mistakes the characters make (a door kept unlocked, for instance). I only have one major complaint about the film: even at a scant 86 minutes, it goes on for too long, halting to a crawl during a prom sequence that unwisely tries to build some suspense to accompany the humor (though I will give the climax credit for successfully managing to lampoon "Carrie," "Psycho," and even "The Tenant"). That being said, "Student Bodies" is a fine, funny horror lampoon, even more resonant in the fact that, despite its early placement in the slasher pantheon, it still manages to nail all the clichés that have afflicted the genre ever since.

A 1980'S version of "Scream." I found myself laughing more than anything. "The Breather," made me laugh. I couldn't help it. I thought I was supposed to laugh. The guy is making snide remarks and breathing like a horny 12 year old for the entire movie. The cast is unknowns, which makes the movie a sort of cult classic for me. I enjoy the film because it's just plain old silly. It's not gory and it's not in the least bit scary. It makes fun, more than anything, how murder victims in horror movies end up. You'd never see a killer walking around with a bunch of Hefty trash bags as their weapon, but in this film it's used purely for the laughs and after a while it does get old, but "the Breather" will make you laugh enough to watch the whole thing. Good for a Halloween laugh.