Graduation Day (1981) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 16

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Soon they’ll be out amidst the cold world’s strife. Soon they’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life.

Graduation Day is one of the first slasher films to set the action within a school, tying the murders into the normal hormonal interactions of the teens. It borrows a little bit from some classic thrillers but doesn’t go far enough into horror territory to be worthwhile.

Before Viewing

The narrator of this R-rated trailer touts the achievements of a number of seniors at Midvale High. A new wave band plays music at a skating rink as students party. The narrator explains that there are only 7 days left until graduation as a number of students are shown getting killed by various methods. The narrator continues that there will be no one left for Graduation Day at this rate.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

During a Midvale High School track meet, senior Laura Ramstead (Ruth Ann Llorens) suffers a blood clot and dies at the conclusion of a race. A stopwatch indicates her time was 30 seconds. A few months later her sister, Naval Ensign Anne Ramstead (Patch Mackenzie) returns home for the graduation ceremonies. She asks the driver of the pickup truck who is giving her a ride to stop when she sees a Midvale runner going into the woods. The girl, Paula (Linda Shayne), is stalked by someone in a gray sweatsuit and black gloves before having her neck slashed. Anne returns to her house, where her stepfather Ronald (Hal Bokar) treats her like dirt. But she’s a tough Navy woman and tells him to back off. A pair of black gloves and a gray sweatsuit are noticed in her luggage.

Later another member of the track team, Sally (Denise Cheshire), is walking to school through the woods and is startled by Anne, also on her way to the campus. The seniors are engaged in a practice graduation ceremony by the much-hated Principal Guglione (Michael Pataki). He introduces Anne to the students as Laura’s sister, who is here to pick up a trophy and honor her sister with a moment of silence. Anne meets with Laura’s boyfriend Kevin (E. Danny Murphy), who corresponded with her after Laura’s death. That afternoon Anne stops by Kevin’s house where he lives with his hard of hearing Grandmother and lots of junk. She notices a scrapbook of Laura on the table and the two talk about her sister. Back at school, Sally is performing a gymnastics routine for a newspaper photographer while getting harangued by Coach Michaels (Christopher George) for her concentration. While changing in the locker room, she is stabbed by a person in a fencing mask and sword.

Elsewhere, Dolores (Linnea Quigley) takes her top off for the music teacher Mr Roberts (Richard Balin). Later he hears odd noises and follows them to the boiler room where he discovers an audio tape of his activities with Dolores. Someone’s out for him, but probably not the killer. Anne visits the woodshop, which is Coach Michaels classroom. She confronts him about the death of her sister, which she believes was in part his fault. Another team member Ralph (Carl Rey) is tossing his football in the woods and encounters Doris and Joanne (Vanna White and Karen Abbott). They toss his football into the shrubs and when he goes to retrieve it encounters the killer who places a long spike into the football and skewers Ralph. The killer uses a stopwatch to time this murder at 30 seconds.

MacGregor (Virgil Frye), the school security officer, razzes Coach over losing his job. At the end-of-school party, a new wave band plays at a skating rink while Dolores and her boyfriend Tony (Billy Hufsey) head into the woods to have sex. They are both decapitated by the killer with a machete. The next morning–graduation day–parents call Principal Guglione to inquire where their kids are when Inspector Halliday (Carmen Argenziano) shows up to investigate the disappearances as well. Pete decides to get in a quick pole vault before the festivities, but when he lands on the padding he is skewered by multiple spikes and dies. Investigating around the school, Halliday believes the Coach may be behind the murders when he finds Sally’s body stuffed in a locker.

Kevin enters the locker room blaming the Coach for his friend’s death. The Coach, now wearing a gray sweatsuit, runs into the woods with Kevin following. They fight and the Coach finds Ralph’s body. Kevin suddenly admits to the killings and says he was going to marry Laura. Inspector Halliday arrives, and believing the Coach killed Ralph shoots him dead. Anne learns that Kevin took Laura’s trophy and follows him home. At his house, she finds Laura’s dead body in Kevin’s room which startles her. She ends up knocking it, and the killer, out the window.

Anne runs from the house back to the school, stopping to rest at the bleachers. Kevin follows her and they tussle, but Laura is only barely able to ward off his blows. Eventually, she manages to push him into a small equipment shed where Pete’s spike-ridden body hangs, which skewers Kevin as well, and he falls dead to the ground under the bleachers. She returns home and has a dream that a bloody Kevin enters her room and awakens screaming. Her mother turns on the lights and the person standing before her is actually her drunk stepfather holding a bottle. She gets a ride out of town the next morning.

“Laura is still with me. She will always be with me.” – Kevin

Time for the next movie in a theme week made up of collegiate slasher films inspired by Randy’s quote from Scream 2. In that film, he asks the killer what his favorite scary film is. “Wait. Let me guess. The House On Sorority Row? Dorm That Dripped Blood? Splatter University? Graduation Day? Final Exam?” And with that, I have the majority of films to review in a theme week. You can check out these links to the previous films, Sorority House Massacre (a substitution this year), The Dorm That Dripped Blood, and Splatter University. Tonight’s film is Graduation Day, an early slasher film. Early in the sense that it came out in 1981, which is only a year after Friday the 13th was released. But late to the party in terms of being an early copycat. There were 19 other slasher-inspired films in 1980 and 22 slasher films that were released in 1981. It opened the same day as Friday the 13th Part 2, which could have been good or bad depending on the viewer’s tastes. It was a film trying to compete with a lot of other contenders at the box office. From a budget standpoint, it did very well, pulling in almost $24 million on a $250,000 budget. But critically it was panned, which probably had more to do with the bloody content than with the film itself.

Graduation Day was also an early adopter of the themed slasher film. Halloween and Friday the 13th had cemented a holiday theme for slasher films (along with Black Christmas way back in 1974). The holiday-themed films continued in 1981 with My Bloody Valentine, Friday the 13th Part 2, and Halloween II. The new template for slasher films took some of its inspiration from Carrie and set stories in local high schools and colleges. Prom Night was a popular 1980 release, so Graduation Day picked another popular school event to include as the backdrop for its killings. It was followed by Final Exam (tomorrow’s film) which came out about a month later, a comedic slasher film called Student Bodies, with Night School rounding out the year.  As evidenced by the movies being reviewed this week, the school genre film was as popular as ever during the 80s.

The opening of the film introduces audiences to Laura’s sister Anne, a tough ensign in the Navy who flew all the way from Guam to be at the graduation ceremonies. Well, we’re actually introduced to her sexy legs in the pickup truck she’s riding in. The driver keeps staring at them eventually deciding to cop a feel. She grabs the bandana around his neck in one hand and his crotch in another telling him if he tries that again he’ll be eating his “balls for lunch.” Why was she hitchhiking back to her hometown anyway? It’s such an odd choice. She also stands up to her stepfather, a drunken slob, pushing him away from her and telling him how it’s going to be. Unfortunately, as soon as she changes into civilian clothes, this level of agency is removed. She gets a little tough with Coach Michaels in his classroom, but the final act makes her the typical screaming and hysterical woman seen in many horror films. She flails and spazzes around trying to get away from Kevin, eventually able to use some of her self-defense moves to stop him. So what happened? It seems like making her a tough, almost manly, woman was supposed to be an early attempt to implicate her as the killer–getting revenge on the team for Laura’s death. It’s a flimsy setup and something that is dropped quickly since the killer was obviously a male.

Coach Michaels is also built up as a suspect, however circumstantial (if showing him in possession of knives, black gloves, and a gray sweatsuit would hold up in court). If audiences are to believe something that Anne says, he apparently struck Laura–which may have given her the blood clot that killed her. Kevin had a similar distrust of the Coach’s involvement in her death. However, he claimed that he loved his kids. Sure, he pushed them hard and yelled at them, but he cared for them. Yes, he cared for them in that creepy way that coaches do. Watching him watch Sally in her leotard during her performance was extremely gross and he lecherously looked on, yelling at her sternly when she lost her concentration. He is not to be trusted because he’s lusting after teenage girls, not necessarily because he’s a killer. The Coach, along with the other school employees, all have vices that make these adults poor role models. The Marvin Hamlisch-looking music teacher (played by Dick Balin–gotta love that name) loves the eye candy of having these young nubile women around. He hooks up with Dolores because she knows it will be an easy way for her to pass the class she cut all year. Principal Guglione is a misogynist, putting his hand all over his secretary, Blondie (E.J. Peaker). She can handle herself but doesn’t rebuff his crude advances, especially when he tells her how to do her job. MacGregor is an ineffectual and cruel police officer. Inspector Halliday just wants to file a report and get out of there–without actually doing anything. And Ronald is a drunk who yells at his wife and bursts into Anne’s room in the middle of the night. No wonder the kids in this town are a mess.

The killing scenes in the film are not the most tense of moments. They follow the basic formulas with a handheld camera stalking the kids before either a fake-out surprise or an actual killing. The biggest question is who the killer might be and why are they killing off the rest of the team. Kevin’s motive, once discovered, seems the clearest. The death of his girlfriend sent him over the edge. In fact, his story is amazingly similar to Norman Bates from Psycho. He lives in a house cluttered with junk (statues instead of stuffed animals) and his hard-of-hearing grandmother–a Mother substitute. He decides to keep his dead girlfriend’s corpse in his room (like Norman’s shrine in the basement). And kills people that he blames for her death, which breaks the similarity slightly since Norman was urged to kill by the Mother side of his persona. It’s an interesting homage and switches up the formula slightly, while still making the killer crazy. The best thing that can be said about Graduation Day is that it’s uneven. An example is the fast-paced editing used in the opening track meet sequence, which doesn’t seem like the place for such an experimental technique. That style is used much better during the barn-burner skate-o-rama/rock video sequence that sandwich Tony and Dolores’ death. It seems like the film has some things it wants to say, but ends up getting distracted by the entire filmmaking process, which ultimately ends up bogging it down.

Report Card

• NOTE: Graduation Day gets one demerit for using a Fake ID to sneak into a list of collegiate slasher films.
• Arithmetic: Eight deaths by killer. One additional death by blood clot reportedly attributed to being hit by Coach. Meets expectations.
• Science: A variety of implements are used in the murders. But they are often hoaky, like putting spikes on/in the pole vault padding–which go unnoticed. Meets expectations.
• Phys Ed: Lots of running. Unfortunately, it’s all from the members of the track team. Meets expectations.
• Fine Arts: Visually uninteresting. Many shots of the woods from the same repetitive angles. Blood looks too much like tempera paint. Below expectations.
• Music: Awesome early music video for “Gangster Rock” by Felony in the middle of the film. Exceeds expectations.
• Final Grade: C
• Teacher comments: Graduation Day was the 2nd film for Vanna White after an appearance in Midnight Offerings, another 1981 thriller. She of course is best known for her role as the spokesmodel on Wheel of Fortune.
• An early horror role for Linnea Quigley, she would make a name for herself as a Scream Queen in titles such as The Return of the Living Dead, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, and Night of the Demons.