Some movies are forgotten for a reason.  I’d never seen Night School until recently and any hopes of discovering a new diamond in the rough were squelched early on. Though released in the first wave of slice-and-dice slasher films that appeared after the success of Halloween and Friday the 13^th, Night School just doesn’t make the grade when compared to other flicks of that era.  Moreover, fans who have hailed it for being one of the first female-centric slasher films seem to be willing to ignore that the violence (and general attitude) towards its female characters is terribly lurid.

First-time (and thankfully last-time) screenwriter Ruth Avergon’s script revolves around a leather-clad killer chopping the heads off women attending, you guessed it, night school in Boston’s inner city.  While the stalk-and-kill scenes have a certain style to them, it’s the tripe that takes place between the kills that drags this movie down to the depths.  Avergon’s characters are one-dimensional and attempts to flesh them out fail miserably in the hands of actors without the chops to get the job done.  In her first role, Rachel Ward (The Thorn Birds) walks and talks like she’s a bit drunk while straight-laced detective Leonard Mann emotes as if his life depends on it.  As a bed-hopping professor, Drew Snyder revels in the fact he’s been cast as catnip to women when his performance is more like garlic to a vampire.  The identity of the killer is easy to spot pretty early on and the red herring finale is pretty flimsy.

88 minutes feels like an eternity when you have pacing problems and that blame falls to director Kenneth Hughes.  I guess it’s hard to expect the director of the spoof version of Casino Royale and the family film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to have much alacrity with the horror genre.  This was not only Hughes’ one foray into horror but his last film ever…maybe the large drubbing this film received upon its release in 1981 played a part in that?