13 Morts 1/2

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.

"Studen Bodies" is the movie that started the Horror parody movies. The winning formula of the movie is a mix between sexual/scatological humor and cheesy/teenager humor.

I had to dig into a rare video store's catacombs and after researching and finding some atrocities, I found "Student Bodies". I searched for this movie for years and finally the time came. The VSH copy I found to my surprise had good sound (although Mono) and decent image. I prepared myself pop corns and sat to enjoy this hidden gem.

The Slasher genre has a lot of clichès and "Student Bodies" makes the adequate and necessary parody of them. Sex being the motive for death scenes, gore, dumb characters and a lack of logic are the elements that this movie makes fun of.

The movie makes fun of "Friday the 13th", "When A Stranger Calls" and "Prom Night" mostly (also, look for the "Carrie" ending spoof). I wonder if Wes Craven was inspired by this movie to create "Scream" because most of it's scenes are very similar (including plot!).

The situations are very funny and perfectly mix with the funny lines and one-liners. With some discriminatory jokes towards a black guy, a minus-valid guy, a foreign student, etc. the movie works without being very rude. The script is clever and asks for the jokes and parodies. They don't make movies like this anymore. I prefer 10 times "Student Bodies" than the "Scary Movie" trilogy.

The actors do what they have to do. "The Stick" is a great comedian! and a cult classic character of the 80's cheesiness. The body count meter is another classic moment in the genre. I watched this movie under the name "Thirteen corpses and a half"; the title is explained because of the body count meter. My only beef with the movie is it's silly ending. I know the movie is a Horror Comedy but still the ending left a lot to desire. With a dumb explanation the events get resolved although I felt good for Malvert!

I wonder if they re released this movie in these days, would it be a hit? I think yes. It's a cheesy but funny movie and a good way to kill 80 minutes.

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.

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!

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.