Rush Week

'Rush Week' is a late 80's slasher that came out during the dying days of the genre, it's a likeable effort yet very average with plenty of T&A but not enough gore or suspense. The majority of this flick plays out more like a teen comedy than an effective slasher film and could have done with better kills and more tension.

The plot = Toni (Pamela Ludwig) a young journalism student transfers to a new college, where several female students begin to disappear during the campus's rush week where she meets Jeff (Dean Hamilton) the head of the Frat fraternity and begins a relationship, while at the same time investigating the disappearances, which makes her a prime target for the killer.

Despite the movie's flaws its entertaining enough if you're in a certain mood, as it boasts a decent budget, solid performances and a killer soundtrack, but these positives doesn't help it rise above its faults as the mystery element is very predictable and the kills are very boring and mostly off-camera, plus there's too much time devoted to the boring romance sub-plot and the Frat house pranks, which doesn't add anything to the overall story.

Pamela Ludwig makes for a decent and likeable final girl, she's intelligent and handles the movie quite well. Dean Hamilton also makes for a decent leading man, he's interesting and charming in his role and has good chemistry with the female lead. Kathleen Kinmont was also a fun addition to the cast in her small but memorable role.

Overall 'Rush Week' is light on gore and thrills but has just enough cheesy 80's charm to make for an okay time waster.

"Rush Week" follows Toni, a young journalism student at a university where the female coeds seem to be disappearing. As Toni digs deeper, she begins to uncover a common theme running between the women.

This late-eighties entry in the slasher cycle is a fairly routine and (unfortunately) also fairly forgettable experience. It boasts all of the hallmarks of the sub-genre: A college campus, rowdy students, sex shenanigans, and a killer dispatching the populace. In some ways, it heavily recalls films like "Girls Nite Out," except it's much less sinister and has only a sliver of the intrigue. What "Rush Week" really lacks is any real bite. There isn't enough suspense established to really keep the audience on their toes, and the stalking and murder scenes play out like something from an "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" episode--that is to say, they are muted, bloodless, and largely unthreatening.

The villain here boasts a medieval battle axe as the primary weapon, and dons a black cloak with a plaster mask (harkening to the ritualized rush week theme), and while it sounds like it should appear menacing in theory, it just isn't. Pamela Ludwig makes for a decent lead here, and the finale has the film at its most vital (which unfortunately isn't saying a whole lot) with the hackneyed revelation and unveiling of the killer's motive. For a low-budget effort, you could do worse, but there is an unmistakable blandness to "Rush Week" that black cloaks and fog machines cannot distract from. 5/10.

~Spoiler~

Rush Week is another uninteresting slasher from the late 80's. This time our killer dons a cloak, an "old person" mask, and a double edged axe. So it's nothing groundbreaking. It seems like the filmmakers wanted to make Animal House into a slasher movie. Much of the running time consists of college pranks and the typical hijynx that goes along with that. The problem with this movie, other than the glaring predictability, is that the death scenes all occur off-screen. There's plenty of nudity to speak of, but no gore whatsoever. So I guess you could say they got it half right. One very strange aspect of this film is the casting of Gregg Allman in a minor role. He seemed very out of place and very wasted. Also watch for Halloween 4's Kathleen Kinmont and Friday the 13th 5's Dominick Brascia.

It's Rush Week at Tambler College and there's parties and plenty of pranks going around. Toni (Pamela Ludwig) is a journalist student assigned to write about rush week. But when students go missing, she decides to write about that instead - endangering her life in the process.

When no-one believes something happened to the missing students, Toni investigates. She is assisted by Jeff (Dean Hamilton), one of rush week's pranksters who also becomes romantically involved with her. 'Rush Week' is an interesting whodunit murder mystery, different to the many slasher movies of around the same time. It has more substance and there's hardly any gore here. In fact, many of the scenes end abruptly just when a victim is about to get killed - almost like a TV movie. This might be disappointing to die-hard slasher horror fans.

But, being an 80's slasher, there's plenty of female nudity. Yup, sexploitation at its best. Boobies, boobies, boobies! 'Rush Week' didn't make a big impact at the time of release, and is also one of the less known slashers of the 80's. Yet, I actually enjoyed it more than expected.

Rush week is when fraternities and sororities recruit new students: the guys at Gamma Alpha Epsilon take this matter very seriously, which makes them an obvious target for the wild boys of Beta Delta Beta, who enjoy playing juvenile pranks whenever they aren't partying. Assigned to report on the tradition is ambitious journalism student Toni Daniels (Pamela Ludwig), who sniffs out a much better story when several young women on the campus go missing...

An attempt at blending Porky's style humour with slasher horror, Rush Week fails on both counts: the comedy is cringe-worthy, the Beta Delta Beta guys being a thoroughly unlikable bunch of douchebags whose idea of a good time is to ruin everyone else's fun (their supposedly funny tomfoolery includes sabotaging a bicycle race and tricking a hooker into sleeping with a corpse!); even more disappointing is the scary stuff, which is frustratingly 'dry', the action cutting away whenever the films killer, wearing an old man rubber mask and hooded robe, gets choppy with his axe.

Thankfully, director Bob Bralver loads his film with big breasted girls who are only too happy to strip for the camera, which helps the time pass less painfully. If only the gore had been as plentiful as the boobs...

4.5/10, generously rounded up to 5 for IMDb.