Massacre At Central High — Massacre At Central High(Blu Ray)

From the mid 70’s Massacre At Central High is a high school drama that deals with bullying and revenge. It’s a tonally unbalancing film that shifts between TV movie mawkishness/ hamming it-up acting, and cruel at points intense torment/ violence. Here from Synapse Films is a recent Blu-Ray release of the film, taking in a new HD scan, commentary track, a new making-of documentary, and more.

Massacre At Central High (aka Blackboard Massacre) was made in the year 1976. It was an American production filmed in Griffith Park - 4730 Crystal Springs Drive, which was also used in the first Back The Future film. The picture was written/ directed by Texel, Noord-Holland, Netherlands born Rene Daalder, who had five feature-length films- taking in the likes of satirical drama White Slave(1969) after-the-bomb drops fantasy come no wave/punk musical Populattion:1 (1986), and asylum set sci-fi thriller Hysteria (1997).

The film focuses on David (Derrel Maury) who's just moved to town, and is starting his last year in high school(though the cast mostly looks in their 20s/ early ’30s). The only person he knows at the school is Mark (Andrew Stevens) – who is part of a gang that rules the school with their way, way over-the-top bullying- including trashing a geeks car, attacking 'n' ripping the clothes of female students, and general extreme humiliation ‘n’ beatings. The gang largely give new boy David a wide berth due to his connection with Mark- but one day after he breaks in on the gang's intimidation of two girls- things change, with the gang dropping a car on his leg- so he has a constant limb.

David decides enough-is-enough, and starts taking out the bullies one by one in fairly extreme, at times bloody manner- like one jumping to his death in an empty swimming pool. There are moving towards horror touches here and there, but they are fairly fleeting- with the film being best described as a high school drama, with nasty edges to it.

The acting here is very, very mixed, and this with the mawkish tone and cheesy to camp singer-songwriter songs and scoring does slightly lessen the impact of the whole- though that said when the more intense/ brutal content does occur it’s decidedly jarring and nastily effective. And this tonal shift really makes it stand out from the run-of-the-mill high school drama- so as a result, it’s very much of a curio, which you’ll either love or late- so I’d suggest checking out the trailer first here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG1zSLNbpvw

 

Moving into this region free disc. And we get a good HD scan of the film, which is both bright and bold. Moving on to the extras, and the main/ big thing here is Hell In The Hallways (42.27) which is a new making of. It takes in interviews with six of the male actors including lead Derrel Maury, one of the assistant directors, and the director of photography- this is a good in-depth doc, with the actors relating interesting on-set stories and working with director Rene Daalder- who sadly passed in 2019, hence why he wasn’t involved with this doc. Otherwise, we get two sort-of- commentary tracks- first is Mike White of The Projection Booth Podcast featuring interviews with cast members Andrew Stevens, Robert Carradine, Derrel Maury and Rex Steven Sikes. And the second partial (25.15) archive one with director Renee Daalder, conducted by writer/horror historian Michael Gingold Lastly there’s a theatrical trailer, TV spots/ radio spots, and a stills gallery.

So, Massacre At Central High will be of interest to those who enjoy high school dramas, though you’ve also got to be prepared for brutal bullying and violence. With Synapse Films doing its usual classy job on this reissue.