Director: Douglas Grossman
Writers: Leo Evans and Douglas Grossman
Starring: Jason Brill and Christopher Cousins
Body Count: 6
Review: Hell High is by turns both really, really formulaic and cliched, and also really inventive, smart, and clever.
And unpredictable--but not by much.
Breaking away from the usual slasher formula, the film begins partially as a dramatic thriller. Four delinquent teens (this is a year or two before Heathers came out, so you have to excuse the filmmakers' lame "delinquent-ish dialogue" given to these characters--they didn't know any better at the time) play a prank on their Biology teacher, and end up killing her. But what they don't know is that the woman has a deep, dark secret--two murders of her own, and when she comes back to life, that murderer instinct comes back to her, and she systematically hunts down the lot of them.
The story's really cool, and the characters are neat--but they're total stereotypes, which comepletely blows my mind. There's so much originality in this flick, but there's equal amounts of cheese and cliche. It just doesn't make any sense....oh yeah, and the original 80s music they use rocks. This is a definite essential in the bad-but-almost-great category, and is totally worth viewing.