Slaughter High is a very typical and very average revenge-slasher which finds the killer of the film come back in a mask to mete out the vengeance he sees fit upon those that wronged him and disfigured his face when he was in high school. He accomplishes such by staging a fake reunion at the school which closed down a few years previous and one by one, they all fall prey to his machinations.

There is nothing overly original about this picture except the little twist at the end, which also happens to be quite disturbing and the only people it will please are those that either love slashers or those that have never seen one before. Everything a person would expect to see in a film like this is here – the smart, bookish kid who everyone likes to pick on, a group of bullies made up of jocks and the popular girls and of course, the accident which would lead to all of the blood to come. There is no real guessing as to the sequence of events and thus, it takes a little of the suspense away, but there is still enough present as Marty – the killer in question, hunts those down to kill them in different and sometimes, very gory ways. There is one scene in particular involving a bathtub that really stands out, a truly gruesome exercise in horror that is repulsive for all the right reasons and if there is one reason to watch this movie, aside from being a starring vehicle for Caroline Munro that is it.

Aside from Munro, the rest of the cast is fairly inconsequential though they do play a part and on top of that, do a good job of making their characters seem highly unlikeable. That too is one of the better clichés to be featured in the slasher medium, that of making the audience cheer for the killer. In any other genre, it might seem like a strange thing, but it never fails that one always seems to root for the one doing the killing rather than those being killed – the victims never being developed enough for the audience to like or just enough for the audience to hate.

It is not as if Slaughter High is all that bad because it is not, but it simply never rises to the occasion which is its biggest crime. It could have been great, as any movie has that potential, but in a sea of slashers, this one was just okay and not much more than that.

3 out of 5