Corpo Estudantil

STUDENT BODIES is a great, satirical take on the bevy of horror flicks that flooded theater and drive-in screens(and consequently, polluted video store shelves)in the eighties. Watching this group of no-name actors trudge through all the stock situations that teens in these flicks find themselves in goes to show how the people who conceived and made this flick got the joke long before most of us. What's incredible is that this movie came out in 1981, well before the genre peaked and the films became stale variations of HALLOWEEN, FRIDAY THE 13TH, OR NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. While SCREAM was a black comedy/satire that pays homage to the genre(and served to revive it), STUDENT BODIES plays it strictly for laughs, thumbing its nose at all the insolent jerks and dumb bimbos who, despite having knowledge of a killer on the loose, wander alone through isolated woods or dark hallways and wind up on the wrong ends of axes, chainsaws, butcher knives, or pitchforks. Now, who stole my paperclip?

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"?

The first 20 or so minutes of the movie are pretty funny. Sure, there are some cheesy gags in there, but there is a jovial spirit that makes even these lamer gags ones that make you giggle. However, after that part of the movie ends, the frequency of the gags that work grows slower and slower. Eventually, the laughs totally stop and the remaining portion of the movie is somewhat painful to sit through. I suspect that the major production problems that happened during filming are the chief culprit here, not only explaining the drop in humor but also how some things don't make any sense even for a goofy comedy. (It would also explain how some additional gags seem to have been added in the movie during post-production.) There are laughs here - even a few that would be considered classics of some kind - but nowhere enough. Actually, considering how many visuals of the Dr. Pepper logo that are displayed, maybe it was intended as a commercial instead of an actual movie!

I stumbled upon this flick by accident. I was more interested in the other side of the Commander USA double feature. I just figured this was some lame 80s slasher flick. To my surprise, it was an Airplane style spoof of the slasher flicks of the late 70s/early 80s. In fact, it almost plays like a parody of "Scream", years before it came out. Everyone tries to figure out who the killer is that is picking off the students. The killer calls up and breathes heavy. Every horror fan should check this out!

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.