Graduation Day (1981)

 

As I hit play the first thing I am greeted with is the familiar music of a Lloyd Kauffman Tromaville production!  Now the only thing I think Kauffman does is buy the rights to a film then slaps his opening sting to the beginning of it.  Possibly, but Uncle Lloyd wouldn't just buy any old crappy movie.  Would he?  Graduation Day is an early entry in the 80's slasher movie craze.  The best age of the slasher pic might I add.  Graduation Day was written and directed by Herb Freed who also brought us Beyond Evil and Haunts.  In the first fifteen minutes we get a musical montage of high schoolers engaged in various track and field events to what I swear was cheesy 70's porn music.

 

   Christopher George (who anyone that is familiar with yours truly knows I am named after because my grandfather was a fan of his TV show Rat Patrol) plays their coach who watches in horror as one of the girls on the team wins her race and then ends her race.  After the opening credits another member of the team runs on a wooded path with ominous John Carpenter Halloween type music playing.  And she gets killed with a stop watch.  Not really but the killer does carry one.  Those polyester gym shorts!  I remember wearing shorts like that.  This movie could use  a remastered DVD or Blu-ray release because the version I saw had insane tape hiss!  Also starring is Patch MacKenzie (It's Alive 3 and Dark Tower) as Ann Ramstead the dead girls older sister.  This one also features a very young Vanna White from Wheel of Fortune and Linnea Quigley (The Return of the Living Dead and Night of the Demons) in  small co-starring roles.  Lennea puts the moves on the music teacher and at first I didn't think her moves would work on him because she didn't seem to be his type but they have a little fling. 

  

Someone is putting X's over peoples faces in a  picture of the track team hidden in the locker room.  There's a band called Felony who performs at a graduation party and they were a real band.  Who knew?  Sounded kinda like The Doobie Brothers.  OK, so the pole vault kill gets best of the film award.  Red herrings lead to Coach George but no way!  It gets kinda slow in the middle and who the killer is was pretty easy to figure out.  While this never got the attention of the big titles it still holds up decent today.  Judging on a dual basis of then vs now I'll give this two and a half stop watches out of five but I would have been at three back when it came out.  Give it a shot if it's your thing, you could do a lot worse.