Splatter University (1984) Directed by Richard W. Haines
If you have ever read any of my reviews, know me personally or have seen any of my tweets, then you know my love for 80s slasher movies. I recently signed up for Amazon Prime and I was looking around at the horror movies, and found a bunch of old slashers that I haven’t seen. I was overjoyed as you can imagine, and I turned on Splatter University the other night for a watch. Going into these movies I learned not to hype anything up anymore, just to expect every one to be terrible and I will probably be surprised. Also a small disclaimer, I couldn’t find a thorough summary of the film online, which I usually use to keep myself on track, so if this tends to wander, I apologize. ENJOY!
The film opens at a psych ward….big surprise. The screen says the time, but its completely spelled out, which I find odd. What is wrong with 4:23pm not FOUR TWENTY THREE PM? Also what an odd time to start the scene, some random ass time in the afternoon will do! What have I been saying all along? Every small town in the 80s has a psych ward! Anyhoo, you see a guy really hamming it up, crooked hat, crossed eyes, derp face, and stooge poking a mannequin head over and over. Al Snow would even find the use of this fake head rather stupid. What does everyone want?! Ok I’ll stop with the dumb wrestling references, for now. A doctor walks down a hall and opens a door, where he is met with a knife in the dick. Yes you read that correctly! A guy gets dick stabbed. Instantly dies of course. This movie has the horribly corny bright red blood like in Iced, the review I did earlier. The music kicks in as the patient escapes the ward in the doctor’s clothes. The music sounds like it was ran through an old NES or something, but not cool 80s casio.
Jump ahead “Three Years Later” that old cliché, of course now its advancing quickly, doesn’t that always happen in these movies? You see shots of a teacher sitting in her classroom looking at papers. There is a heavy use of the cliché POV shot with heavy breathing much like Halloween or Black Christmas if you will. The teacher gets stabbed and dies, this killer only stabs his victims once and it is instant death. The next scene shows our main character Julie interviewing with Father Jensen about the vacant teaching position. Jensen tells her the story of the past teacher being murdered in her classroom. Julie asks if she was murdered. No bitch, she was murdered in her room but she’s alive and well. Julie accepts the job and goes home. Her elderly neighbor shows up and tells her some story about someone getting poisoned to death, and she says that its “nicer” to go that way than get murdered. Well, I guess technically she’s right, but isn’t getting punched in the stomach better than getting punched in the balls? I guess? The neighbor walks off and Julie empties half a can of air freshener in the apartment, apparently she ripped ass or something, I’m not sure.
A group of college students stand around talking, what are their names? I couldn’t really tell you, sometimes in this movie they only mention a characters name once and if you don’t pick it up, well you’re fucked. There is a guy that howls all the time and looks like a mix of George Clooney and a gorilla, he’s a curly headed doucher. There is a girl in a red leather jacket that desperately wants to be Pat Benatar, her name is Cathy, I found that out like fifteen minutes later. At first I thought it was Pat, she even sounds like her and I originally thought the character’s name was Candy, I was mistaken. At this point they show another group of friends, completely unrelated to the others that are talking about god knows what. There is a chubby guy named Tony, some broad with huge red hair named Denise. Denise’s hair rivals that of the singer from the band Icehouse, they sang the song “Electric Blue” back in the day, look it up. At this moment in the movie I realized that there isn’t a core group of students, just a couple different groups and the main character is Julie.
The next day Julie has her first class, and it is full of tools that don’t give a shit about what she’s talking about. There is a priest that comes in to monitor, he looks like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. The mustachioed priest is an awful actor, so wooden, but fortunately he is just a small bit character. Basically the priest doesn’t like what she’s teaching since it isn’t part of the college’s curriculum. Julie has to meet with Father Jensen who warns her to stick to the curriculum, yeah it is as exciting as it sounds. I’m surprised that Jensen didn’t mention the fact that she’s just letting her tits flop around in her sweater without a bra at a Catholic college. Then we see Tony groping the shit out of Denise on his couch, she tells him to cool it and he does, for like five minutes then gropes her again. Denise’s roommate comes in and they stop. There are way too many characters in this movie, by this point I started losing track of what was going on, but I hoped for a big body count, we will see how that unfolds.
Now at a bar, one of the groups has a conversation about how boring Julie is as a teacher. Tony and Denise flirt a little, and I noticed then how truly terrible the framing is in this movie. At one point, Tony is talking but only half of his face is in the picture, then someone off camera talks and the editor quickly cuts to him. Next scene some girl dressed like Julian from Trailer Park Boys gets into her car, of course it doesn’t start this is a slasher movie. The killer walks up, grabs her head and slices her forehead with a big blade. What happens? You guessed it, she dies instantly. How can you die from getting your forehead slashed? Is that even possible? You don’t have a jugular in your forehead or anything. If this were true, Ric Flair would have been dead like 30 years ago. See another wrestling reference! The killer then disposes the body in the nearby dumpster.
The next day, or later that day, I don’t know, Julie is teaching her class and no one is even paying attention. She says something about a paper being due, and the class plays it off like they don’t know and she just goes for it. After class Cathy talks to Julie and explains that she’s knocked up. I have no clue why she would confide in Julie. She is a brand new teacher and really doesn’t know anyone. Nevertheless, Cathy is knocked up and she is afraid to tell her boyfriend. That night a group of students go to a drive in and a guy drives up in a car, suddenly his girlfriend lifts her head off his lap and replies to something saying “because they suck” then she wipes her mouth off. Classy girl! Good for the random guy though! At the drive in, in the old man’s Ford, not really Cathy’s boyfriend has a GTO or something, but they watch the movie and he tries to put the moves on her. Cathy fights him off and says she’s not in the mood, he instantly gets angry and asks if she’s preggo. She doesn’t reply, the guy looks like a skinny Lou Ferrigno, and he decides to get out of the car. Cathy of course goes into the woods trying to find him and gets murdered; the killer slashes her throat, finally a believable death! Lou comes back to the car and gets in the back seat. Cathy’s body is in the front and its obvious she’s dead, but Lou thinks she is “in one of her moods” and just berates her over it.
The next morning the news is out about Cathy’s demise and Julie talks to the class about it. They cut to Jensen talking to Cathy’s grandma or mom I’m not sure she’s old. Jensen seems to be flirting with the old hag regardless of who she is. Then cut to another priest, this one I have no clue what his name is but he is talking to Denise. Denise wants to talk to him about her sexual encounter with Tony, wait did I miss something? Tony just grabbed her boob and kissed her neck, how is that sexual? The perv of a priest tells her to meet with him at 8pm to talk about it, creepy. Julie suspects a guy named Mark that she met earlier is the killer. Why? Your guess is as good as mine friend! She rummages around his apartment when Mark shows up, and she hides. She narrowly escapes the building and Mark sees her get into her friend’s car and drive off.
In school the next day, everyone says they smell something foul coming from Julie’s room. She opens the door to find her friend dead in the closet, she screams and runs out. This is the classic cliché reveal scene I was waiting for. Julie goes to talk to father Jensen about it. A random woman walks into the bathroom and pisses, complete with pissing sound, awesome, not! The killer is in the stall to her left, waiting for her I guess, that’s odd. How did the killer know she was going to piss at that exact moment? He waits for her to open the door and stabs her in the stomach, again she instantly dies. In the next scene Denise talks to Tony on the phone explaining she talked to the priest about their “sexual encounter” and she’s quickly killed with another stab, this time to the mouth. Probably the only decent kill in the movie.
Julie calls father Jensen to set up a meeting so she can tell him who the murderer is. Why wouldn’t she call the police? Jensen tells her to meet him at the school, he wheels outside and throws something away in the dumpster. Mark shows up and Julie hits him and runs to meet Jensen. Mark tries to tell her that she’s wrong that he’s not who he thinks he is. He calls the school and hears that Julie is going to meet with Jensen, and freaks out. Its at this moment that the killer is obviously Jensen, but we’ll get back to that shit.
Julie reaches the school and sits down to talk to Jensen, saying Mark is the murderer. Jensen for some reason explains that he can walk, he stands up and tries to kill her. Why not just let Mark take the rap? Cmon man! She kicks him in the balls and runs off. He chases her through the school, lightly jogging. Julie hides in a bathroom, but finds the dead woman in the stall. There is something written on the wall in blood, but they flash it so quickly that you can’t even read it! Why even bother people? I can’t even make out what the words are let alone relate it to anything in the movie. She gets to an elevator and takes it. Jensen just stands there watching. The doors open and boom there’s Jensen, he grabs her and stabs her to death. I have to admit, I didn’t see that coming so kudos. Mark makes his way into the building and finds Julie lying in a puddle of blood. He has to stick his hand in it and make sure it is blood. I mean if I saw a girl lying in a puddle of tick red liquid, I’m just going to assume it is blood. Mark gets up and looks for Jensen. Jensen calls the cops, finally trying to blame Mark for the murders. Mark finds Jensen in his office, cleaning his hands off. He looks over and notices there is blood on the crucifix behind Jensen. The two guys have a stare down and they cut away. Now they show two doctors talking about Jensen really being the escaped lunatic named Daniel Graham. He was posing as a priest for two years at the school. Ok so two years? Remember at the beginning of the movie when he killed the teacher, and then it said 3 years later? What did Jensen do for that one year? Follow around Eddie Money on tour or something? If so, I’m extremely jealous! Back to the doctors, they explain that he’s deranged and blah blah blah. Then Graham rambles on about something and the movie ends.
Yup that’s it! How about that shit for an ending? Yeah rather anticlimactic if you ask me. The slasher genre is usually known for it’s off the wall and crazy endings that you sometimes don’t see coming. Take Sleepaway Camp for instance, no worries I’m not ruining it for you, watch that movie now! This just ends with Mark staring at the cross, and Jensen going back to the psych ward. No fight, no struggle, no scenes of the cops arresting him. I read online that this movie was shot in 1981, but the runtime was only 65 minutes, too short for a feature film. So after the big slasher boom the director decided to reshoot 20 or so extra minutes in 1984 to finish the movie for the direct to video market. They were only given a week to shoot the rest of the footage so the actors slept in the classrooms at Mercy College. Its funny hearing stories like that and how the business was in the 80s. Watch the Cannon Films documentary on Netflix and you’ll know what I mean. Splatter University as a whole is really a jumbled mess, it is not awful, but really far from mediocre for the genre. Remember how I wanted a high body count in this movie? Yeah there really isn’t one, only like five people die, most of them with stabs to the stomach, so it is rather dull. The whole premise of Jensen being a lunatic and pretending to be a priest is ridiculous. I mean he’s an old dude, if he showed up at a college, applying for the job they’d wonder why he didn’t have prior experience or a social security number that matched the name, right? That’s what you would think. Again the whole year off thing is quite odd to me. The acting is wooden, and the dialogue is awkward at best. The special effects are nothing to write home about, even for a low budget slasher they are horribly underwhelming. I don’t think I would suggest this to anyone, even if you love slashers. If you are a completest like me, and must watch all the slashers then go ahead. Don’t expect much really because it is not that great. Slightly below average. I would give this movie a D+ borderline C-. What I learned in this movie is that its super simple to escape a psych ward and become a priest at a private college, at least in the 80s.
PS another example of the person on the poster not being in the movie! Always awesome!
