Le collège du cimetière

According to the director this movie was taken from him and butchered into the incomprehensible mess that is Cemetery High. He apparently has washed his hands of both this and Galactic Gigolo.

Now Galactic Gigolo isn't great, but it has its moments and can be enjoyed when you are desperate for more from the people who brought you Psychos in Love. Cemetery High on the other hand is a nearly joyless affair.

Perhaps one day this movie will be reassembled by the director and a result all the children of the Earth will live in peace and harmony. Holding one's breath while waiting for this day to come is not advisable. It is double plus inadvisable that one watch this movie under any circumstances.

It's a gosh darn shame that things turned out the way they did between Gorman Bechard and Wizard, Cult Epics, Full Moon or whatever Charles Band is calling his company these days. We'll never know what the Psychos in Love gang might have given us had they not been so thoroughly screwed.

I rented the DVD of this movie because I saw it was written and directed by the people who made the hilarious cult classic PSYCHOS IN LOVE. However, this effort falls far, far short of that movie. First, I want to mention that the picture and sound of the DVD is among the worst transfers I've experienced. The movie goes all blurry when something moves, and the sound is so faint that it's near impossible to make out what people are saying.

However, even if the DVD transfer had been up to snuff, I would still find this movie terrible. The director (Gorman Bechard) has disowned the movie, saying that it was taken out of his hands and reworked by others. The movie sure comes across as a patchwork job, with obvious new footage awkwardly edited in, and a central story that moves at a crawl and lacks things like character development with the central characters. But whether it's the original footage or new footage, the movie is extremely unfunny. There are only three or four gags in the entire 81 minutes that are mildly amusing.

It was apt to put the word "cemetery" in the title, because this is one movie that should be deeply buried in one and never dug up again.

My review was written in July 1989 after watching the movie on Unicorn video cassette.

"Cemetery High" is a threadbare horror comedy being released direct to video.

Made-in-Connecticut pic originally was titled "Assault of the Killer Bimbos" when lensed for Charles Band's Empire Pictures in June 1987, but that catchy moniker was reassigned several months later by Empire to a west-coast lensed feature instead.

With backyard movie production values, talky tale concerns a quartet of angry women who following high school graduation become vigilantes to wipe out "male slimeballs", after having been assaulted. Led by Debi Thibeault, they later recruit voluptuous Ruth Collins to join their army and help in the seduction of unwitting males.

Flat line readings by much of the cast and too many unfunny in-jokes and self-references to the film progress sink this exercise. Old-fashioned gimmick of inserting shots of a Gore Gong and Hooter Honk to announce impending explicit violence or nudity merely breaks up the action in tiresome fashion. Gore content turns out to be relatively tame.

Cemetery High is part of a trio within the Full Moon catalogue. Director Gorman Bechard and much of the crew and cast worked on this and before it both 'Psychos in Love' and 'Galactic Gigolo' for Full Moon. Basically a group of average looking young women decide to eliminate all the perverted and criminal men in town including naughty corrupt town mayor. Fortunetly for the bullet manufacturers pretty much all the man are very bad. Though most are vulgar there are moments when the vigilantes seem to be coercing men in order to find them guilty and deserving of death. The death scenes are pretty amusing and as mentioned in a spoken introduction there will be different noises for nudity (a bike horn) and violence and so on. The cast regularly refer to the fact that they are in a film and that it needs to be entertaining for the viewers. Of course by these women's 'all men must die' standards the viewing audience would probably be a victim of the very gang they are watching. Relative fun.

After being raped and/or beaten up by men, high school grads Kate (Debi Thibeault), Michelle (Lisa Schmidt), Dianne (Simone) and Kathy (Karen Nielsen) turn vigilante and aspire to wipe out "scum-sucking @SSholes!" Slobs, bikers, barflies, wannabe rapists, anyone who hits on them with a bad come-on line and, in one case a guy who's just harmlessly walking down the street, are all wasted.

Each time violence or nudity is shown, the warning gimmicks "gore gong" and "hooter honk" (a horn) are sounded. It's fun at first, but runs itself into the ground pretty quickly. The girls tell each other it's time to get naked, whine when they get blood on their shoes and fight over who gets to kill who. The mock documentary approach (also used in Bechard's PSYCHOS IN LOVE), where characters talk directly to the camera, is fun and used well.

OK, this is desperate, stupid, senseless film-making and the cheap comic gags are often irritating, but it did make me laugh out loud several times.