★ 7 / 10
**_How to make a micro-budget slasher_** Someone is
Wuchak
**_How to make a micro-budget slasher_** Someone is savagely murdering cheerleaders in a town on the Ohio River in Western Pennsylvania. Is the killer the…
**_How to make a micro-budget slasher_**
Someone is savagely murdering cheerleaders in a town on the Ohio River in Western Pennsylvania. Is the killer the leering high school janitor, a local thug or someone else?
An American production from the mid-80s, “The Majorettes” was released in Italy in 1986, in the UK in 1987 and in the USA in 1988 (on video). It was made with a cast of no-names and only cost $85,000 so there are some technical issues, like questionable sound in some sequences, the campy preacher, and some wooden acting here and there. If you can overlook these shortcomings, it delivers the goods for this genre by including the most important staples.
For instance, the script is well done and contains genuine surprises, based on a book by John A. Russo; the locations are good; the slayings are brutal; the gore is pretty convincing; there’s some effective action in the third act, which is also unexpected; the principle actors are fine for no-names; and the female cast is superlative.
Speaking of which, petite brunette Joy Deco is probably my favorite as one of the majorettes, yet fit Dana Marie Maiello (Barbara, the swimming girl) is worth a mention. There are a few other notables, like Sueanne Seamens (Judy).
The movie runs 1 hour, 32 minutes, and was shot in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, which is just northwest of Pittsburgh, a 25-minute drive from the Ohio border, as well as O'Hara/Guyastua, an area just northeast of Pittsburgh on the other side of the Allegheny River.
GRADE: B/B-
★ 5 / 10
OK, so it's not a great movie....
mattymatt4ever
It's not even a good movie. To many standards, this would be considered a bad movie, bordering on awful. But it's intention was B-horror, so what can you…
It's not even a good movie. To many standards, this would be considered a bad movie, bordering on awful. But it's intention was B-horror, so what can you really say? To be fair, my review is a tad biased, since I've been reading a book called "Making Movies" by John Russo, the writer of the screenplay and the novel. He discusses the making of this movie in several chapters, and hence I became hugely interested in checking out this obscure horror flick. So I bought a copy of the video on Amazon.com for a cheap price, eager to add it to my collection. I always enjoy (being an avid video/DVD collector) having movies in my collection that virtually no one has heard about. Hell, there are people out there who aren't avid video/DVD collectors who have movies like "Gladiator" and "Independence Day" in their collections. So I don't want to jump on the bandwagon. Besides, I'm always curious (outside the collection circle) about obscure independent and low-budget films. So the minute I received "The Majorettes" in the mail, I was more than psyched to watched it right away. Needless to say, this is a truly amateurish work. The dialogue is horrible and the acting is even worse. The film itself isn't very well made, but the atrocious acting was so bad that it distracted me from the cheesy aesthetics. But at least I got some laughs out the deal, though unintentional. The death scenes were poorly edited. They were edited somewhat like a R-rated movie edited for television, cutting mostly to close-ups and medium shots of the killer, until we finally cut to the knife being slashed across the victim's neck. Then we see a little blood. That's the only gore we see, and I'm sure that's due to poor production values. We basically just see the victims drenched in blood, to let it be self-explanatory that the victims got stabbed in other places. But the only effect the director was able to pull off was the neck-slashing.
The plot is flimsy, full of way-too-obvious red herrings (the evil nurse, the creepy janitor, the fanatical priest--just to name a few), and when we finally discover who the killer is, we don't have a clue as to what his/her motive was. It's basically just thrown in there to have the audience go, "Wow! I had no clue he/she was the killer!" I was definitely surprised to find out who the real killer was. I just didn't think it made much sense. And towards the third act, the plot meanders, totally abandoning the majorette-killer premise and seguing into another subplot.
So I have a lot of bad things to say, regarding to how this movie was made. Who wouldn't? I think a better approach would've been camp horror, rather than serious horror. But I got enough laughs from the bad acting (the actors literally never change expression and sound more like they're running through a first read-through) and didn't really need the actors to wink at me and confirm that they're in on the joke. Nevertheless, it has a certain so-bad-it's-good quality. It's like a train wreck. It's really bad, but you just want to see what happens and who gets out alive. I ain't gonna lie, this movie really interested me, in the way that monster movies used to interest audiences back in the 50's. So if you're looking for fun, B-movie entertainment--then I would recommend checking it out. But there's one other minor criticism I have to let out: the lack of gratuitous nudity. There is nudity in the film, but it's not exploitative. If this were a first-rate, or even second-rate, film that would be a good thing. Basically, you see the sides of the girls' breasts, but rarely do we see frontal nudity. Call me a perv, but if you're gonna make a bad B-movie, you may as well thrown in a ton of nudity. It's not like feminists are gonna be watching this! My score: 5 (out of 10)
9%
AUDIENCE
· 100 ratings
4.6/10
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