12th April 2016, 09:05 PM
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| Cultist on the Rampage | | Join Date: May 2011 Location: Leeds, UK | |
GRADUATION DAY – Looking back on all those first wave slasher films, it's in a way surprising how many of them seem quite odd and not just the linear stalk-teens-and-kill affairs suggested by prototypes like 'Hallowe'en'. I say this partly with reference to a raft of recentish releases from the likes of Arrow and 88, including 'Madman', 'The Mutilator', 'Blood Rage', 'X-Ray' etc etc. Of course, the anomalies will always be the exceptions, and many slashers were just the by-the-numbers run throughs my memory tells me they were. Where does 'Graduation Day' fall in the scheme of things? Maybe it treads a middle path, but I think it tilts more towards freakdom. Either way, there's a hell of a lot wrong with it, for both good and bad. I have to say that it really does set its stall out right from the opening credits, where awful eighties funk cheese gilds a collage of shots of pumped up athletic high school fascism presided over by a frothing-at-the-mouth Christopher George. From the evidence available at this stage, we suspect we might be in for something a bit high school, something a bit gonzo, and potentially something a bit badly made with absolutely no sense of taste. Thankfully this turns out to be 'Graduation Day's exact trajectory, and before long we acclimatise to a strict classroom regime of wonk which includes killers timing kills as if they were track events, flickering montage effects that seem unjustly psychedelic, cops sniffing flowers, dudes with extensive flick knife collections etc etc... 'Graduation Day' boasts many minor eccentricities. But it's a film which, like its adolescent charges, may be in the throes of identity crisis. The tone is all over the place, with swampy atmospheres giving way to light hearted hi-jinks at the switch of a blade. Lugubriousness wrestles ludicrousness, which normally I'm OK with – I am here too, but there are some scenes of chilling gravity (i.e an effectively creepy locker room sequence) which are essentially undermined by the film's inability to follow one true path and, like, find itself maaaan. The benefits of this lack of filmic self knowledge come in the form of flights into mania such as the whole song and dance thing – not only can 'Graduation Day' not get the atmosphere right, but somewhere around the midway mark it threatens to leapfrog genre status and morph into a musical. So we get little outbursts such as 'The Graduation Day Blues', a classroom sing-along, followed by a high school roller disco prom with a band who play hard rock whilst looking New Romantic! Again, these weird, weird mismatches and dichotomies. If I smoked as much reefer as the dudes in this film, I might start to think that all those crack lines were deliberate attempts by the filmmakers to say something about the state of the contemporary American adolescent's psyche. But I'd probably get distracted by an Argento-esque choreographed chase / kill scene involving the killer in fencing gear which ends in the victim being betrayed by a dog. 'Graduation Day' – might not make the grade as anything like a good, well made film, but it gets at least an A-level in slightly crazed cinematic tripe management.
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