★ 4 / 10
**_Spoof of early slashers_** A heavy breather is
Wuchak
**_Spoof of early slashers_** A heavy breather is murdering teens from a high school in southeast Texas, usually while they’re engaging in sex. "Student…
**_Spoof of early slashers_**
A heavy breather is murdering teens from a high school in southeast Texas, usually while they’re engaging in sex.
"Student Bodies" (1981) satirizes slasher flicks like “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” with a high school milieu of baby sitters getting strange calls, funerals, classes, teachers, football games, parades, proms and the like. It starts out amusing enough with decent goofy humor, but as it progresses there’s too much tastelessness, which is simply offensive or eye-rolling and not actually funny.
Still, there are some highlights if you’re in the mood for a moderately amusing throwaway flick.
The film runs 1 hour, 26 minutes, and was shot in Katy, Texas, a town just west of Houston.
GRADE: C-/C
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★ 6 / 10
Either the hidden gem you are looking for or over the top parody with a few good laughs that's still worth a watch due to it's uniqueness...
markovd111
If you can, I strongly recommend to watch this movie with a good friend because it's probably hilarious that way. Watching it alone, I found it hard to laugh…
If you can, I strongly recommend to watch this movie with a good friend because it's probably hilarious that way. Watching it alone, I found it hard to laugh at most of the jokes because they are so constant and over the top they are just not funny to me. If you liked the movie "Airplane!", you will probably like this movie and have a good time. While I acknowledge the effort and good ideas in the movie, I personally didn't laugh a lot, but never the less I think the movie deserves it's share of praise for parodying horror genre clichés. Acting is also really great and, all in all, I give "Student Bodies" 6/10! It's definitely worth a watch both to hardcore genre fans and casuals alike. Just make sure to enjoy it in company!
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★ 6 / 10
"Funerals get me hot!"
Jonny_Numb
Part of me thinks that, if the ever-reputable Criterion Collection can put out a 2-disc special edition of crap like "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas," they…
Part of me thinks that, if the ever-reputable Criterion Collection can put out a 2-disc special edition of crap like "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas," they certainly could throw a bone to a sharp-witted parody like "Student Bodies," which nails the genre better than the 3 "Scream"s (which eventually went down the route of self-parody anyway) and the 4 (and counting) "Scary Movie"s. So why, then, has this cover-all-bases send-up been relegated to a word-of-mouth cult item since its 1981 release? Distributor Paramount, which hit paydirt with "Friday the 13th" the year before (and its sequels in the years following), likely saw "Bodies" as an opportunity to take a satirical jab at a genre that really only "began" with the breakout success of John Carpenter's "Halloween" (1978). The result? A film so ahead of its time that the audience didn't know what to make of it--relatively goreless and sex-free (our killer offs his teen victims BEFORE they get a chance to score), "Student Bodies" approaches an "Airplane!"-style level of pull-all-stops humor (albeit on a shoestring budget) that remains surprisingly tasteful, even in the midst of cracks about necrophilia and a farting corpse. The opening 15 minutes alone stuffs in references to "Halloween," "When a Stranger Calls," "The Prowler," and even Dario Argento's gialli (our killer's gloved hands figure heavily into the plot); the filmmakers superimpose a helpful "body count" tally plus other deliciously obvious mistakes the characters make (a door kept unlocked, for instance). I only have one major complaint about the film: even at a scant 86 minutes, it goes on for too long, halting to a crawl during a prom sequence that unwisely tries to build some suspense to accompany the humor (though I will give the climax credit for successfully managing to lampoon "Carrie," "Psycho," and even "The Tenant"). That being said, "Student Bodies" is a fine, funny horror lampoon, even more resonant in the fact that, despite its early placement in the slasher pantheon, it still manages to nail all the clichés that have afflicted the genre ever since.
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