Rating: 3/5
Track and field — the crowd goes wild. Laura’s pushing, the crowd chants her name. After 30 fucking cuts, she crosses the finish line and collapses. The track team gathers around her. She’s dead.
Cut to two months later. Laura’s sister, Anne, in US Navy regalia, bums a ride with a handsy truck driver to the high school graduation, where Laura will be honored. He insinuates that Navy women are lesbians.
As they stop, Paula runs by in huge earphones. A hand in black gloves starts a stopwatch and runs after. It catches up to her, slits her throat, and stops the stopwatch. The camera makes sure to linger on the outline of Paula’s ass in running shorts.
Anne sees her mom and stepdad, who is less than enthused to see her. Anne rests in Laura’s room — her stepdad, Ronald, converted her room to a darkroom. She unpacks a gray sweatsuit and a pair of black gloves, just like the ones that killed Paula.
We cut to a dimly lit locker room. Black-gloved hands pull out a photo of the track team. Laura’s face has an X through it. The hand pulls out a tube of lipstick and draws an X over Paula’s face.
Herb Freed and Anne Marise had a formula for writing the screenplay, studying all the slashers at drive-ins. They arrived at a simple idea: one dead body every nine minutes. As a result, the movie wastes no time wasting teens.
The film has epilepsy-inducing edits as it cuts between frames. I like it when it slows down enough so you can see what’s happening. The special effects are, well, nothing special. In the first kill, the trick knife shoots blood everywhere before it makes a cut.
Denise Cheshire does a full-blown uneven bar routine. She wasn’t an actress but was a finalist in the 1976 Olympics gymnastics team. She retired from gymnastics and did stunt work, including Jack Frost and Men in Black II. She has one of my favorite exchanges in the movie:
— My sister had eyes like yours. She's dead now — Oh, jeez, well, I better run
Tom Hintnaus is also a real-life Olympic pole vaulter. His kill is silly (compliment).
Vanna White shows up and says that someone scared her so much that “she peed herself.” This movie was her first or three film roles.
Early Linnea Quigley role! I didn’t recognize her at first.
I don’t know, I liked this! It’s funny, it’s weird, and it has some distinct set pieces. Football with a retractable blade? I’ve never seen that before.
But a 7-minute rendition of Gangster Rock by Felony is too much.