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I thought I'd kick the new year off with another movie marathon. I thought it was time to check out a few old school mystery flicks. Som...

Monday, June 17, 2019

Splatter University (1984)




The Slasher flicks keep coming here at the Horror Dude Blog. I’m digging deep with this New York shot low budget entry into the genre. Is it helped or hurt by the setting and lack of funds? Time to dive in and find out.

Things start as they many times do with an understaffed hospital losing track of one of the patients. When a doctor finally locates him in a closet he is promptly stabbed in the dick and has his clothes taken! Five minutes in and we get a dick stabbing which is a good sign of the mayhem to come. A helpful blurb on the screen lets us know that it is three years later. We see a woman in a classroom grading papers when there is a knock at the door. She opens it and gets stabbed in the boob! Doubling down on the awesome here people. But then things go downhill fast only to pick up at the end.

It is the next semester and we are introduced to the replacement of the woman who was killed. Her name is Julie, and this is her first teaching job. We know this because she talks to the Priest at the college, this is apparently a Catholic school, and tells him so. Talking becomes a common theme as that is what the next twenty-five minutes is. No action, no stalking, no killing, just talking. This destroys the great pace that the movie kicked off with and drags it all down with exposition on characters that I just didn’t care about. This not only includes Julie and her love interest, but also a bunch of generic students that are clearly too old to be in college.

Told you there was a boob stab!
After far too long there is another killing, and things start to pick up just a little bit. Though it isn’t until the last fifteen minutes that it gets nuts. The students that were introduced start getting murdered on screen. Throats are slashed, guts ripped out, a ginger gets a knife to the mouth, and torsos are stabbed. The kills are fairly tame, but I give them an “A” for effort as they did the best they could with the low budget. You can tell that an attempt was made to try and show as much as possible without the budget for lots of latex and gags. I just wish that they had spread the kills out evenly over the duration to help with the pacing. Splatter University can be very slow and gets tedious at times. The cast isn’t good enough to hold the audience’s attention with scene after scene of dialogue driven backstory. It needed spiced up with some violence and gore.

I hadn’t seen Splatter University for a long time before dusting off my old Elite DVD. I remembered liking it, but as I was watching I couldn’t think why. Then the kills started up and I began having fun. Even then I was on the fence about whether I would recommend it. Then the ending happened, and I was sold. Splatter University does something that I’ve never seen a Slasher movie do before or since. No spoilers here because I want people to watch this one. The last fifteen minutes sells the movie and is worth your time. I recommend it.


© Copyright 2019 John Shatzer

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