Let's take a moment to harken back to the golden era of the slasher flick in the early eighties.Any deformed and/or deranged homicidal maniac stalking sex-crazed teenagers on the big screen equated to box office gold.Smackdab in the middle of this glorious time to be a horror aficionado,director Mickey Rose effectively parodied the genre with his film,"Student Bodies".And "The Breather" was born,setting the stage and raising the bar for any and all future attempts at horror comedy.Bodies pulled out all the stops,exploited all the shortcomings,paid tribute to genre classics,poked fun at stereotypes and disabilities,and stands alone,in my opinion as the greatest of its kind,bar none.Yet to be released on dvd at the time of this writing,and something of a forgotten and hard-to-find classic in any format,Student Bodies is bound to have your jaw dropping and side splitting in the same instance.
"Click.""Did you hang up?""No,I just said click."
Toby Badger(Kristen Ritter) is a high school virgin with a Prince Valiant haircut at Lamab High.All around her,her classmates are dropping like flies as they lie down to have sex.The murderer is "The Breather"(Richard Brando),a wise-cracking psycho in rubber gloves and galoshes who speaks through a rubber chicken on the phone.On Jamie Lee Curtis' birthday Toby's friend Julie is killed while babysitting with paperclips jabbed into her face as her boyfriend is asphyxiated in a garbage bag.Principal Peters(Joe Talarowski)is forced to juggle school extracurriculars,the big funeral,the big parade,the big game,and the big dance,with help from Miss Mumsley,his assistant,Dr. Sigmund,the school psychiatrist,Nurse Krud,Mr. Dumpkin,the shop teacher with a fetish for horsehead bookends,Ms Van Dyke(What's in a name?Everything.)and Malvert,the impossibly double jointed school janitor who got whiplash in both directions during a car crash.Since accident,Malvert sometimes pee red.
Charles Ray(Cullen G. Chambers)arrives at school,as his seeing-eye dog pulls into a parking space.
Helped by nerdy pal Hardy,Toby pokes her nose around the murder scenes for clues as to who the Breather might be,since nearly everyone at the school is a suspect.The horny girls die at the football game(bludgeoned with a horsehead bookend),during the parade(the black prom queen candidate is killed with an eggplant,oh sweet irony!)as their boyfriends are smothered in trash bags.The school administrators receive crank phone calls from the Breather as they focus their investigation on Toby,since she's always the first one to find the corpses.They send her to the school psychiatrist,who relates his findings to the student body over the loudspeaker system,that though they have no hard evidence against Toby,she could very well be the psychotic killer they've been looking for,but no one should treat her any differently(!).
"Whore!All girls same,All girls leave Malvert!"
Halfway through the film,a spokesperson appears on the screen and explains that there is no explicit sex or violence in the movie,but since R rated movies are the most popular,the producers have asked him to say "Fuck you" to the audience.Toby and Hardy develop a plan to lure the Breather out into the open at the school dance where,in disguise with balloons down her top,she convinces Malvert to lift Principal Peters' keys from his pants.The janitor also lifts Peters' cheese,which he keeps down there to attract mice.As another candidate is killed with her own crown,Mr. Dumpkin faces off against the killer,who is armed with a saw.Dumpkin encourages the Breather to clean and oil the saw in true shop class fashion before the maniac clobbers the teacher in the head with it,removing him from the list of possible suspects,as shown by the flashing subtitles at the bottom of the screen.As Toby thumbs through files in Peters' office,the principal comes upon her,wearing only a pair of boxers and an "I Love NY" tattoo on his chest(he's been naked underneath his clothes all these years).Together with Miss Mumsley,who is his mother AND father,they reveal their guilt in the murders.Toby spirals into a nightmare dream sequence before waking up to realize it was all a dream,Wizard of Oz style.Or was it?
"What have we here,miss shouldn't-be-in-the-class-anyway?"
If you love horror movies and comedies,this truly is the best of both worlds.Rapid-fire jokes fly at every juncture,meriting several rewinds to catch them all throughout.Obviously,I've saved the best gags and bits for you to discover on your own.Some may take offense at the pot shots taken at minorities and handicapped individuals,but it's all done in the name of good fun,afterall.Once you've seen it,I guarantee you'll chuck any copies of the "Scary Movie" series you might embarrassingly own into the bin,and add it to your list of repeated viewings.Find yourself a copy,and make "Student Bodies" the finest slasher parody in your dvd player at this time.
Four out of four B.W.'s
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