School's Out
Director: Robert Sigl
Writer: Kai Meyer
Starring: Katherina Wackernagel
Body Count: 6
Review: There are two things that can happen when you want to see a movie and have to wait for a while. One, your interest in the movie can grow, increasing the more you have to wait. Or Two, your interest can die out, to the point where the movie means very less to you than it initially did. Unfortunately, for me, the former was the case with this made-for-TV German flick that hit the states direct-to-video (thanks to Fangoria Video). I say unfortunately because no matter how hard this flick might have tried to be cool, it fails on almost every level.
It's graduation time at an old German high school, and the student body is throwing a rave party in the school. Unbeknownst to the party-goers, there's another gathering going on as several graduates break into the school building and set up some rather creepy and elaborate pranks. Along the way, they tell the spooky story about the old mental patient who went on a murder spree in the the very halls the students now walk. And, coincidentally, we are informed early on that the same mental patient they speak of has just escaped!
In addition to this, there's also a little subplot of sexual relations (of course) between a teacher and a student. This is just starting to get established when a psycho in a harley quinn outfit shows up and starts slicing and dicing people with a giant pair of scissors.
Now while all of this might sound great here, it really doesn't play out as well as one would hope. The flick was admitedly maid right after the enormous sucess of Scream, and it shows in parts(with numerous references, both in visuals and dialogue, to Psycho) and doesn't show in others (this film had some pretty terrible dialogue, quite the contrary to Scream, in which the dialogue was one of the strong points).
I can't say that School's Out is the worst film I've seen in a long time, but it's definitely not worth waiting for. It might pass the time alright, the identity of the killer keeps you interested throughout the otherwise excrutiating 90-minute running time, but it's unlikely that you'll want to rewatch this flick again.
Trivia: Producers are currently hard at work on a sequal to School's Out, titled Island of Fear, and scheduled to hit German TV sometime next year.
