Rush Week, when one considers it alongside the larger pantheon of slashers, is pretty weak comparatively. It is not all bad, it simply fails to deliver what people want in a slasher and that is slashing or more colloquially, killing and blood to go along with it. It is not a lot to ask for.

Pamela Ludwig plays Toni, a journalism student at college who is assigned to cover rush week but soon discovers that a girl named Julie has disappeared. Deciding to look into that particular case, she finds that another girl has gone missing and it all leads to a shady operation where girls model in the nude and at first, Toni thinks it is the head of Beta Delta Beta who is responsible. Jeff denies it and the two of them team up for a bit while various girls continue to go missing and are murdered by a masked man. Clues lead to the dean of the college, to a man offering cash for photoshoots, to the science building and so forth until Toni is finally in the killer’s sights and it ends with both an interesting twist and a beheading.

There are usually two things that make for a good slasher and the first is blood with the second coming right up behind – pretty people, most often girls. This film has no shortage of beautiful women who find themselves in all sorts of undress with some of it actually moving the plot along, but that is not to say that there are not a couple of handsome young men within for those who prefer the male form. So while the movie has one, it has quite the shortage of blood and gore as most of the kills take place off-screen and while one does get the gist of what is happening as it is quite easy to tell, seeing it would be better and one has to wonder why the choice was made to do so.  Given the killer and his choice of weapon, it makes it downright confusing why seeing the murders was not a priority.

While the killer himself was somewhat interesting, this was a purely paint-by-numbers routine which was doing itself no favours nor that of the audience. The makers of this film could have done more had they simply tried and sure, there is some eye candy to draw in a certain demographic but for those that are fans of the genre, there is little here to really sink one’s teeth into. Rush Week is not a terrible movie but it fails to really try at anything which prevents it from being a really good movie. Mediocre would be the best way to describe it and everything within and if one does not mind average fare, then this picture will not disappoint.

2.5 out of 5