Hell High (AKA Raging Fury ~ 1986)
Kinda slasher directed by Douglas Grossman. Seven year-old Brooke likes to play with her dolls in an abandoned shack off a cycling path near her home. When a teenaged couple arrive on their motorcycle to make-out in the shack Brooke hides and watches. The teenaged girl decides she doesn't want sex, and in frustration her boyfriend pulls the head off one of Brooke's dolls (this guy is hardcore). As the couple argue and get back on the motorcycle to leave, Brooke emerges from hiding, looks at the damage to her doll, and decides to go outside and fling mud in the face of the boy steering the motorcycle. The bike crashes and the couple are thrown off and impaled on metal railings, killing them both. Eighteen years later Brook is a science teacher at the local high school and the unexplained deaths of the couple 18 years before have become local legend. When Brooke humiliates high school bad-boy Dickens in front of class, he decides to pay her back and recruits three others to help him. The next night they don Halloween masks and attack Brooke's home, terrorising her inside. What they don't know is that the deaths Brooke caused as a young girl have left her traumatised, causing her to majorly flip out and turn the tables on her tormentors one by one.
Although this was filmed 1986, money running out plus other unspecified delays meant it wasn't released until 1989. By then the slasher was starting to be overtaken by other types of horror. Also, by the time it was released the top-billed actor, 27 year-old Christopher Stryker (Dickens), had been dead for two years from AIDS. The movie underperformed and was largely forgotten for many years. For most of the remaining cast this was their only onscreen credit (with the notable exceptions of soap-queen-to-be Maureen Mooney as grown-up Brooke, and Christopher Cousins as one the of the gang).
The film inverts the slasher trope; instead of a masked killer hunting down a group of innocent teens, it's the teens who are masked (and far from innocent), hunted by a killer whose identity isn't hidden in any way. It also makes the moral aspect murkier, with it being debateable how many - if any of the victims - deserve what happens to them. The performances are okay and the obligatory 80s synth score is fine. The film also ticks the boxes for the expected topless nudity. Pacing-wise it's slow after the initial two motorcycle deaths, and does tend to drag until things kick into gear in the third act. And like a lot of these movies if you start to pull at the plot it starts to unravel. You just have to go with it. But it's a fun piece of nostalgia. 6.5/10
. It was an acknowledged (by Wes Craven) influence on The Last House on the Left (and through that the rape-revenge genre in general).
Polish-born blonde bombshell Vanda Hudson (who appeared in several UK B films of the 1960s) was prominent in the marketing, although her character is a relatively minor one. At just over an hour long it moves at a fair pace, whilst the black and white filming helps with a general feeling of period sleaziness. A good end-of-the-day, easy watch that requires no thinking whatsoever. 6/10
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