Well, it’s been a great ride, folks–but all good things must come to an end with the final installment of Lions Gate’s The Lost Collection. And this time, I’ve got the one horror movie in the lot to hit you with–Slaughter High.
Marty was the kid that everyone picked on, going so far as to have a hot chick invite him to have sex in the girl’s locker room on his birthday and then film him naked. Well, one of the pranks goes a bit too far, and gives Marty a shot of boiling nitric acid to the face, leaving him disfigured for life. But Marty’s not taking this one lying down, no sir–he may have vanished for five years, but he’s also set up an extra-special reunion for the little friends who left him disfigured.
Yes, Marty majored in cutting classmates–and it’s a good thing, otherwise we wouldn’t have much of a movie at all. And when your movie starts out with full-frontal male nudity within the first five minutes, you know you’re in for a serious ride.
See, here’s the especially nifty part: The Lost Collection’s installment of Slaughter High is a fully uncut release. Yes, to get its R back in the day, they had to dump some footage. That footage is now back in full effect. See, back in the eighties, studios couldn’t just release an unrated director’s cut when they went to video. Now they can, but that’s left earlier stuff like Slaughter High in a bit of a lurch. Until now–Lions Gate managed to find a fully uncut master print of this one buried in like a broom closet or something, where isn’t really that important, but the important thing is that you’re seeing this sucker exactly as it was meant to be seen.
And yes, it’s very, VERY, familiar–you’ve seen this type of movie before–but once again, this was actually around long before all those other movies you’ve already seen. You’re looking at a genuine piece of horror history, folks; it really wasn’t a big deal where they found that complete print–it’s the fact that they found it at all that makes this one a downright collectible.
The really interesting part about Slaughter High is that the parts you’ve seen before are very well done…but the parts you HAVEN’T already seen are what really make this one worthwhile. The ending is going to be quite literally unlike pretty much anything you’ve ever seen. I’m having a very tough time recalling an ending similar to this one. And I’ll say this, too–why Simon Scuddamore, who played Marty, didn’t find more work after this one is just downright perplexing. He made an absolutely incredible lunatic serial killer, moving seamlessly from downtrodden nerd to lunatic with an axe to grind in both the physical AND metaphorical senses. He could’ve done some truly AMAZING stuff. Of course, the drug overdose he had the same year Slaughter High was released may well have had something to do with that, but wow…talk about your tragedy, huh?
But regardless of this, Slaughter High ends The Lost Collection with an absolute bang. It’s everything a proper slasher flick should be, and then some. It’s easy to see why so many movies were based on this sort of movie–it does its job with a fierce efficiency that’s unrivaled in most of its imitators.