"After School Massacre" is Mostly What You Expect

So, I was searching for the classic, "Slumber Party Massacre", which I don't think I've ever seen, on Prime Video.  I'm too cheap to pay to see it and too honest to pirate it, but feel as a genre reviewer, I need to see it. Well, it's "currently unavailable" on Prime, but this alternative, "After School Massacre" showed up in the search.  It was free.  I was ready to see a movie.  I watched it.  I felt dirty.

Rather than a trailer, I give you cast interviews. You hear that music in the background?

Every piece of music in the film was like this and competed with the dialogue

for space in  your ears.  It was torture.

"After School Massacre" is the type of movie that in the VHS days was wildly popular.  It has lots of young women, scantily clad, being stalked by a killer.  Unfortunately, there was no clear heroine in this movie.  What there was were a couple of unique kills (what are the odds that my curling iron scene from "Jack vs Lanterns" would be topped in a flick I had never seen?)  Watch for an interesting way to use a mailbox.  There's the jerky mail character, the nerdy murder fodder, a kind of bumbling cop and basically a population of inept adults.  These are all necessary ingredients to the B-movie slasher flick.

The lighting and camera work range from okay to impressive.  The outdoor stuff makes far better use of lighting and color than the indoor shots, which I think is strange.  Usually indies have more time and control when shooting indoors than they do on the street. The atmosphere of the indoor shots really could have benefited from post lighting.  But overall, it was acceptable.  The performances by the main characters were mostly pretty good.  The killer and the goofy boyfriend were way over the top, but I'm pretty sure they were going for that.  The rest of the cast was capable to comical.  Again, probably intentional given the tone of the movie.  

It's one of those movies where if you watch it in the right mood, you can tell everyone making it was having a good time.  That's one reason I shared the cast interviews instead of the trailer.  Sometimes an indie film's best feature is the behind the scenes energy that makes it to the screen.

The other reason I shared the interviews is to get that point across about the music.  The score is at constant odds with the dialogue.  I'm not sure if the dialogue recordings were all poor and so the music was put there to mask it or if the dialogue was fine and ruined by the music. (I know in "Lumber vs Jack", the scene where they discover the tree fungus on the guard, that music was chosen to mimic the mic dropping because we had broken a cable the night before).  Of all the little quirks movies like this tend to have, this was the only one that made it difficult to watch.  Prepare yourself for that and strap in for a throwback to VHS horror fun.

More on that post  lighting process.