Horror High (1973)

Most viewers catch this Jekyll and Hyde revenge of the nerds movie on their local independent stations in the we hours of the morning. I just love a good revenge movie where the antagonists get theirs and then some. We focus on a nerdy lonely student Vernon Potts (Pat Cardi) and his Guinea pig Mr. Mumps. You see Vernon is on the verge of scientific greatness. Vernon spends most of his downtime in the high school science lab working on genetic research. Three main Tormentors ambush Vernon from every angle . Vernon's english teacher Miss Grindstaff (Joy Hash) humiliating Vernon in front of the whole class and chopping up his science project which he spent years perfecting. In addition our crabby Instructor tells Vernon and the class that she's giving him a big fat zero. The caustic janitor played by Jeff Alexander who threatens to ambush Vernon's experiments and wants Vernon to clear on out. Finally , (And most High school teens can relate to this), the Gym teacher Coach McCall (John Niland) tormenting poor Vernon. Each scene of revenge is gory but richly deserved in this horror fairy tale. I found this movie to be very entertaining and you begin to fantasize your own personal revenge on educators who have wronged you in the past or present. But please, don't try this at school. You can think bad thoughts but that doesn't me you have to act upon them. No money back guarantee with the paper slicer.

My thoughts on Horror High-First a few observations and then I will report what I discovered about the History of this film.Observations:* Austin Stoker played Lieutenant Bozeman in this film, Last year in the YT Horror Movie Discussion Group we watched the movie "Ruby" and Austin Stoker played the police officer/brother-in-law in that movie. *Austin Stoker's Lieutenant Bozeman plays the worst game of cat and mouse with the main character, Vernon Potts. His Columbo-style questioning of Vernon leads the viewer to believe that if Stoker's character really suspected Vernon as strongly as the questions he asks seem to indicate, then this case could have been cracked a lot earlier if Lt. Bozeman had just assigned a police officer to track Vernon's whereabouts. * Some people may think that Vernon is a somewhat sympathetic monster. Think again. Why does the whole school start the movie calling Vernon "The Creeper". What did Vernon do prior to this movie to earn that nickname? Vernon was only forced to drink the chemicals once. Every other time thereafter, Vernon willingly drinks the chemical concoction to solve some rather trivial and minor problems in his life with murder. *The janitor, Mr. Griggs, must be a complete idiot. After beating Vernon viciously and then forcing him to drink what could be deadly chemicals, Mr. Griggs tells Vernon that he is going to beat him some more and then take him to the police. Who would the police arrest in that scenario? *Please tell me that somebody else noticed the bushy mustached white police officer angrily twitch his mustache when Lt. Bozeman tells him that he can't "tie up" Coach McCall.Short History of the Movie:*Lots of 50 and late 40 year olds have seen this movie. But many remember the movie being titled with a different name. This movie was popularly shown on late night monster television shows in the early 80's under the title "Twisted Brain". *This movie began production in 1973 during a time when Independent movie productions were becoming popular. This movie was not made by a big Hollywood studio but instead by a company, Horror High Ltd. that was formed by James Graham, the producer of this film. James Graham may have produced this movie soley as a vehicle for his hot girlfriend, Rosie Holotik (plays Robin Jones), to advance her acting career. Rosie was a Playboy cover model in 1972, acted in Horror High in 1973 along with two other B-horror films in 1973 and then never acted again. *This movie seems to provide the same local pride to Irving, Texas (where the movie was filmed) that Pittsburgh feels for "Night of the Living Dead". This movie was filmed exclusively in Irving, Texas during a fast two week shooting schedule. The school used as the setting was a High School for unwed mothers according to a Pat Cardi (Vernon) interview and the actors were not allowed to talk to the students or even look at them for fear of losing the location. *James Graham took advantage of the fact that a lot of professional football players that had went to college in Northern Texas lived in the Irving area. Mean Joe Green, Joe Niland (Coach McCall), Abner Haynes, Calvin Hill (Cleveland Browns RB), Billy Traux, D.D. Lewis, and Craig Morton (Broncos QB in Super Bowl XII) all played characters in this movie. This made filming difficult as fans hung around the sets for autographs. According to Pat Cardi (Vernon), Joe Niland (Coach McCall) would have young Pat Cardi over to his Irving mansion after shooting ended for the day where he had "babes running around the place like hot and cold running water" and young Pat Cardi would get so drunk that it would disrupt shooting the next day. *The movie cost $100,000.00 to make and only made less then $20,000.00 when it was originally released in and around the Dallas area in 1973. James Graham's High Horror Ltd. entered into a distribution agreement with Crown International Pictures and that allowed the movie to travel far and wide so that Variety magazine reported in May of 1974 that it "hit top grosses nationwide". The movie was pushed by Crown International Pictures for the next decade as it was a frequent second feature at drive-ins all the way into the early 80's. One practice employed by Crown International Pictures was to re-release old movies with new titles (Independent producers complain that this was an effort to hide box-office receipts), so this movie was released in different parts of the USA and worldwide with different names: "Kiss the Teacher...Goodbye!", "The Devil's Bible", "The Devil's Beast", "Experiment of the Death Devil's Beast", Werewolf Massacre". *Early promotion for this movie had a Drugsploitation angle. The early tagline for this movie was "Watch Vernon turn on...and then kill". Later once Austin Stoker enjoyed some success in the cult classic "Assault on Precinct 13" the marketing shifted and the tagline became "The man who survived Precinct 13 is Back!" But former child star, Pat Cardi (Vernon), wishes that the movie would have been promoted more along the angle of "I was a teenage Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde", which it never was promoted in that fashion.

HORROR HIGH is a very cheap, cheesy, and inadequate horror feature from the team at Crown International Pictures. It's a film that doesn't have a great deal going for it, aside from the relatively unusual (for the time) high school setting, something that would of course become ubiquitous with the advent of the slasher genre and '80s horror in general.The annoying Pat Cardi plays a usual high school nerd type character who finds himself bullied and put upon by his peers and superiors. Inevitably he injects himself with a super-serum that turns him into a monster of kinds, and he then goes on a killing spree. Basically it's a Jekyll & Hyde story with an American high school setting.The quality of the print I watched on Talking Pictures TV was truly horrendous, which I suppose does add to the grindhouse experience. HORROR HIGH is quite substandard, with slapdash kill scenes and overacting throughout making it hard to watch at times. The make-up for the monster is truly pathetic. The only thing of interest is seeing Austin Stoker, the cop from ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, playing...you guessed it, a cop. A somewhat unconnected sequel, RETURN TO HORROR HIGH, followed in 1987.

Mild-mannered high school student Vernon Potts is a strong candidate for the Pencil Neck Geek of the Year Award. The thuggish jocks in his gym class are always ruthlessly picking on him and beating him up. His bitchy English teacher gives him mucho flack for only caring about biology and chemistry. Vernon's negligent, self-absorbed dad is so wrapped up in making a fast buck that he completely ignores the poor boy. Even the grubby, mean-spirited janitor constantly browbeats him. After being forced to drink a special liquid formula he created for a biology experiment, Vernon acquires the necessary power to violently turn the tables on his cruel tormentors. Wormy, sniveling mouse Vernon occasionally mutates into a hairy, club-footed humanoid monster which embarks on a grisly murderous rampage, brutally slaying everyone who ever treated him badly. The custodian has his face dunked in a steaming vat of sulfuric acid, the English teacher has her hand lobbed off with a paper cutter, and, best of all, the malicious blackmailing football coach gets messily hashed when Vernon stomps all over his squat body while wearing spiked running shoes! Okay, I'll admit that this shoddily made low-budget male adolescent revenge horror fantasy clunker is so incredibly bad that it's often downright gut-busting, but I nonetheless thoroughly enjoyed it just the same. Larry N. Stouffer's ham-fisted direction is loaded with lots of laughably inept affectations; his maladroit use of oddly tinted camera angles in order to capture and convey a creepy mood of impending menace in particular stands out as a tremendous source of inadvertent hilarity. Erstwhile child star Pat Cardi gives a nice, personable portrayal of the pitiably meek Vernon, but the rest of the cast, which includes the ever-smooth and ingratiating Austin ("Assault on Precinct 13") Stoker as the casually assiduous cop investigating the killings and "Don't Look in the Basement" 's Rosie Holotik as the fetching heroine, deliver comically dreadful performances. (Cardi and Stoker also appeared together in "Battle for the Planet of the Apes.") Even 70's football stars Mean Joe Greene, Calvin Hill and Craig Morton have no clue why they were even invited to this celluloid nightmare. Janis P. Valtenburg's chintzy, grainy, unsightly cinematography and the mandatory ghastly ending credits theme song (a sad, haunting, unforgettably atrocious pop-slop ballad called "Vernon's Theme" sung by Jerry Coward) are likewise hilariously atrocious. However, Don Hulette's funky, groovy, syncopated score does manage to hit the correct right-on happening spot. Good, schlocky 70's drive-in horror fun.