Night School (1981)

This 1981 horror film stars Leonard Mann, Rachel Ward and Drew Snyder. This begins with a young woman being decapitated by a mysterious killer. We then meet police detective, Austin (Mann) who investigates and starts finding more headless women. Soon, he suspects a college professor, Vincent (Snyder) who knew the victims and his live-in assistant, Eleanor (Ward). This isn't bad, except for some acting and Brad Fiedel's score is chilling. Give this a view at least once if you're into slasher flicks.

Night School is an excellent, stylish American giallo with terrific set pieces and great use of Boston locations.Several coeds are being murdered with their severed heads found in submerged in water and the detectives believe a sleazy professor is behind it. Add in a jealous lover, a predatory lesbian headmistress, and a whole lot of slashing and we have ourselves a grand ol' time.Night School might just be a perfect mix of sleaze and class. It's hard to believe the same man made Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Brad Fidel's spooky, somber score sets the mood perfectly and helps it stand out among the pack.

Night School (1981)* 1/2 (out of 4)A woman is sitting alone with a stranger dressed in a black motorcycle helmet and black outfit comes up and decapitates her. Soon Lt. Austin (Leonard Mann) is investigating the murder and before long more women from a local school turn up with their head cut off. Suspect quickly falls on a professor (Drew Snyder) who has had an affair with many women and his current love (Rachel Ward) begins to wonder what's going on.NIGHT SCHOOL is a pretty forgettable slasher that tries to mix that genre with that of a police thriller but it pretty much fails on both levels. After watching something like this it makes me appreciate something like 10 TO MIDNIGHT even more. There are all sorts of problems with this film but the biggest is the fact that the horror elements are weak and the thriller aspects are even weaker. If you've seen at least three films like this in your life then I'm going to be willing to bet you'll have no problem figuring out who the killer is.When you're watching a film like this and discover who the killer is so early on you really know you're in trouble. What's worse is that the horror elements are pretty bland as well as the majority of the death scenes happen either off camera or they're covered so that no actual money had to be spent on special effects. I'm going to guess Tom Savini was busy at the time but the producers of this should have waited to get him.Another issue is the fact that there's really nothing that happens as we get a murder then we hear the police talk, another murder and more police talk. This just happens over and over again and after a while it gets boring.I did think Mann was good in the lead and I also enjoyed Joseph R. Sicari and Nicholas Cairis. Ward is also good here and she's also involved in a somewhat neat wink to PSYCHO, which also has her in the nude. That scene alone is almost worth sitting through the whole film. With that said, NIGHT SCHOOL is certainly one of the weaker entries in the 80s slasher boom.

Like sadly too often the case with early 80's slasher-movies, this one honestly isn't as bad as the rating & reputation suggest and it obviously all depends on the viewers' prior expectations. If you're set to see a mindless and undemanding stalk 'n slash effort, you get just that, but with a tidbit of goodwill, you'll even notice and appreciate the creators' slightly more ambitious intentions. The vast majority of contemporary slasher flicks were blind copies of "Halloween", but "Night School" looks for role models that predate Carpenter's horror milestone by several years, more particularly Alfred Hitchcock (oh yes, yet another shower sequence) and various Italian Giallo movies! The killer's disguise and modus operandi, as well as the profile of the victims and several red herrings along the way, seem to come straight out of the script of the typical Giallo-effort. The stylish characteristics and outcome of the story may perhaps fall short (real Gialli have far more complicated denouements), but still this is one of the more likable non-Italian attempts at making a Giallo. "Night School" is also clearly sponsored by Boston's department of tourism, as the opening sequences depict multiple picturesque shots of the city by night. There's a killer on this loose in this beautiful city, completely dressed in black leather and wearing a pitch-dark motorcycle helmet, who brutally decapitates of young co-eds and dumps the chopped off heads in the nearest watery reservoir. Police inspector Austin quickly discovers a pattern, namely all victims attended night school classes and – more particularly – the anthropology lectures of professor / playboy Dr. Millett. All the evidence points either towards Millett himself or towards a simple-minded waiter/peeping tom, but that would just be too obvious, wouldn't it? The actual revelation of the killer's identity is ridiculously simple and easy to predict if you only just paid a little bit of attention to small clues. In spite of the gooey sounding head-hunter premise and its listing among the infamous Video Nasties, "Night School" is a rather tame and UN-shocking film. Most of the beheadings play off screen (at first, I even feared I was watching a censored version) and the rest of the bloodshed is kept to a minimum as well. The one sequence in the Sea Life Centre's locker room is quite mean-spirited, however, and probably single-handedly responsible for the notorious reputation. Director Ken Hughes (director of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", of all people) films a handful of effectively suspenseful scenes, the music is atmospheric and – even though I seem to be the only one who thinks so – the character of Taj (the assistant) was funny!