Hell High is an interesting film as it does things slightly differently than most slashers. In fact, one could say that this movie is more revenge thriller than slasher though it does contain elements of both. Suffice it to say, the picture sports a few bodies by the end of it all and it gets a little bloody in the doing of it.

It all begins with a little girl who just wants to play with her dolls when she is interrupted by a couple of horny teenagers. After ripping the head off her doll, she throws mud at the two while they are on their motorbike causing them to crash and die most horrifically. Cut to the present day and the little girl is now Ms. Storm, the biology teacher at the high school and she is having a rough go of it as the students are unruly and unwilling to listen. That night she is spied upon by a couple of those kids and it is there that one of them, a boy named Dickens played by Christopher Stryker, gets it in his mind to terrorize her even further. That comes to pass as well as a bit of sexual assault and while his friends are against it, Dickens wants to go further. Soon Ms. Storm jumps out of a window to get away and while she seems dead, she is anything but and is going to get her revenge.

Despite having a near-unknown cast, the movie was surprisingly well-acted by those within with Dickens taking one of the leads as the villain and Christopher Cousins as the other though cannot rightly call him a hero or even the protagonist of the film. Making things slightly strange and a bit of a novelty is the fact that there are no real good guys in this movie. Cousins comes close but he is as much a villain as the rest of his gang as he never really stopped his friends from doing what they were doing and for the majority of it, took part in it all. With nobody to really root for, the closest being Maureen Mooney’s Ms. Storm, the audience finds themselves in an odd position when the students start getting killed off. Sure, it is sad in a way but how can one not find it well deserved for what they were doing in the first place? Even Ms. Storm who deals the death in the final act does not end up making it out leaving only one final victim who has to live with everything that happened.

When the picture first opens, it does so with two very bloody bodies impaled on stakes. It is a good sign for what is to come but as it so happens, there is quite a long period before any more actually takes place. It is not until the very last act when Ms. Storm goes on a rampage and then in a frenetic series of events, where the pace picks up and the bodies start to fall, the film finally gives the audience what they have been waiting for. Having that lull in between for the bulk of the movie gave those watching it a chance to get to know the characters and build the story up for those final moments. It was definitely an interesting way direction to take unlike the majority of slashers that see the killer drop his victims one by one throughout the picture and there is that possibility that it might have made this one a bit better had that been the case but such as it is, Hell High turned out to be quite good just the way it was made. It will never be as memorable as some in the genre but as far as films like this go, it is worth a watch.

3 out of 5