SPLATTER UNIVERSITY

Directed by Richard W. Haines. United States. 1984.

I just spent 78 minutes in college, and somehow I feel dumber than ever.

I didn’t mean to watch SPLATTER UNIVERSITY. I meant to watch that 80s slasher movie with George Clooney, but grabbed the wrong film. How could I have done that, you ask. Well, I’m a guy in his mid-40s who has spent a lifetime watching horror movies. My brain ain’t what it used to be, kids. Sometimes when I clean my ears, the Q-tip comes out covered in what looks like oatmeal. Horror movies have turned my grey matter to sludge. I’m afraid to sleep on my side at night. I might wake up and not remember how to tie my shoes or do short division due to brain leakage. I hope I wake up tomorrow not remembering this movie.

It didn’t help that this was my second cinematic abortion of the night. I was still sore from the first one, a piece of absolute gutter filth called BLOOD THEATER. That movie is a trap, offering you up some nice Mary Woronov, only to give you everything else about it. The only thing remotely laudable about BLOOD THEATER is the scene where the cutie at the ticket booth tells her jack-off boyfriend that they’ve only sold 18 tickets to the show. We cut to inside the theater, and yep, there are exactly 18 people in the auditorium. The entire FRIDAY THE 13TH franchise never had that level of continuity.

Everything else is a train wreck, the kind of movie that makes you wish you were watching pigs getting blowtorched in TRACES OF DEATH instead. The sound of a violent thunderclap is matched to a shot of the theater's front door, showing us a pleasant evening with clear blue skies and sunshine. Our high school cheerleader lead is played by a 40-year-old. We are shown a character vacuuming the auditorium, yet when we cut away to a completely different scene on a different floor of the theater, the sound effect of the vacuum persists at the exact same volume level. The worst part about it? I watched it on Tubi, but for some reason, I didn’t get a single commercial break to dull the pain. Fuck you too, Tubi.

I couldn’t even figure out what was supposed to be happening. An elderly man is wandering around stabbing random people, but the theater also appears to be haunted. An old typewriter begins typing by itself. Smoke pours into the projection booth out of nowhere. Film reels are mysteriously hurled through the air by an unseen force. Was this a ghost movie? Was the old man possessed? Is this like THE SHINING, where the building is a corrupting influence on the people inside it? Was that the point of having a “creepy" typewriter scene? Was that supposed to be a reference? All talk and no narrative makes BLOOD THEATER a dull movie. Wait, was the old man supposed to be the usher from the beginning of the film? Why is my neck suddenly wet? Oh, it’s just more brain.

The only positive about this film is that 99.9% of the characters die. A bunch are bloodlessly stabbed. A few are dragged offscreen. A man is inexplicably electrocuted by bumping into a movie projector. There’s a lame decapitation via window frame. I had to watch that one twice to figure out what had happened. Viva la cinema!

Wait, why am I talking about BLOOD THEATER? I should be talking about whatever the fuck this other movie was called.

Oh yeah, SPLATTER UNIVERSITY. There’s a quote on the movie poster that says “The Most Terrifying Film of the Year!”. I don’t know who said that, because the image on Wikipedia is in dog-shit resolution and I can’t be assed to find a better one. I guarantee you that the person who said that thinks vanilla ice cream is ‘too spicy’. You’d have to be a weapons-grade pussy to be scared by this slop. There are exactly two nice things to say about this film. One, it’s juicy. BLOOD THEATER had a tablespoon of blood in the entire movie. This one doesn’t hold back with the gore. The second thing is that it is a merciful 78 minutes long. I don’t think I could have lasted another five minutes. The brains were oozing out by the midpoint, and I was running dangerously low on cotton swabs to plug my ear holes.

The movie starts by telling us that a paranoid schizophrenic named William Grayham has just escaped from his cell inside a nuthouse. A doctor heads downstairs to look for him and is briefly joined by a cop with what looks like a rubber taped to his shirt instead of a badge.

That’s what that looks like, right? Or did I lose too many tablespoons of brains? No, that’s gotta be a rubber. Right? Are you folks seeing this shit?

Anyway, the doctor is stabbed in the dick and dies. Grayham puts on the doctor’s bloodstained pants, makes his way to a local college, and violently stabs a teacher in the tit. Fade to black.

We then cut to a confusing intertitle. It reads, "The next Semester. Yesterday." So the future… but also the past? Richard fucking Feynman would stroke out trying to make sense of that. We meet our new professor, Julie Parker, and the headmaster, the wheelchair-bound Father Jenson. A few other teachers are wandering around, like Mark and Cynthia. What do they teach? Brother, I don’t even know what Julie teaches, and she’s the main character. Another priest is skulking around too, although he doesn’t seem to do anything but bang his students. What I’m getting at is this isn’t Yale. It isn’t even the college from THE SUBSTITUTE 3. You’d probably get a better education from the scribblings on the wall of a truck stop bathroom. You might as well sign up for PragerU.

Seeing as this is a college, kids are hanging around, smoking weed and drinking beers. Don’t ask me what their names are. All of the student-oriented bits were added to pad out the running time, and it shows. Only two kids matter to the plot, and by that I mean they die. There’s Cathy, the pregnant girl who wants an abortion, and Doreen, the soon-to-be pregnant girl who’ll more than likely want an abortion. There’s not much nuance to these characters, folks. We are treated to a three-week time skip for no other reason than the film can’t be bothered to show us Julie and Mark falling in love. It just does it all offscreen. We jump ahead 21 days, and BOOM, they’re madly in love. Before that, the only time we’ve seen them together was when Julie was first introduced. They didn’t even say anything to one another. Mark just stared at her ass as she walked away. It’s like it was meant to be ♥

Unfortunately, Cynthia tells Julie that Mark was dating the teacher we saw killed at the start of the film, and that’s enough to make Julie think Mark is the killer. So, she goes to the police, right? Of course not. There’s a single cop in this town, and he has a condom taped to his shirt. What good would he be?

Seriously. That’s a rubber, right? And is that another one on his hat? I can’t tell. My brain is like melted pork.

Anyway, the headmaster is the killer. Sorry to spoil this masterpiece for you. The reveal raises way more questions than it answers. Like, how long ago did this guy escape from the nuthouse? The beginning makes it seem rather recent. We know the teacher was killed last year, but that’s surely not enough time for a lunatic like Grayham to break out of an asylum, get a haircut, buy a change of clothes and a used wheelchair, get himself ordained, fill out a job application, go through a rigorous hiring process, and then get hired by the local Catholic college. Or maybe it is. Maybe I’m just underestimating him. This guy’s got spunk. He’s a real go-getter. And what’s best is he has a last name that is seriously fucking with my autocorrect. I know it’s 'Grayham', but Pages really wants it to be 'Graham'. So I’m going to have to proofread this review a bunch of times. Which means I don’t get to stop thinking about this turd for at least another day or two. Amazing!

Kudos to SPLATTER UNIVERSITY for having the balls to violently off the lead right before the closing credits, but considering Julie was barely a character, I didn’t feel much of anything, just the wet, slobbery warmth of liquified gray matter rolling down my neck. I think we look back on the 1980s slasher craze with rose-colored glasses. We fondly remember MY BLOODY VALENTINE and THE BURNING. We wistfully long for the days of SLEEPAWAY CAMP and TERROR TRAIN. But hot damn, when these movies are bad, they are soul crushers and brain blenders. This was a rough, miserable night spent suffering through two of the most godawful 80s slashers around. And the truly scary thing is that there are far worse movies than this out there. Some of them are on my to-watch pile. Hopefully, I’ll be 42% more brain-dead by then. Fingers crossed. I want to be drooling and barely catatonic. The reviews will be gibberish and endless paragraphs of Wingdings and shit emojis. Can’t wait.