Student Bodies is a 1981 horror comedy about a murderer known as “The Breather” who kills off high schoolers.
Back in 1996, director Wes Craven, working from a script by Kevin Williamson, poked a little fun at a genre he helped define, the modern slasher. Scream was one of those rare movies that did the spoof thing right while being a legitimately scary movie as well. It still holds up today. Either way, in the process, it created a trend all its own with its few sequels and a thirteen-year run of absurd Scary Movie films from the Wayans Brothers that mixed comedy frights with pop-culture references to limited success. However, these were not the first. For that, we go back – way back – thirty-seven years to time when a splurge of cheesy drive-in gory horror movies dominated the late 70s and the first year of the new decade. Seriously. They were everywhere. So it only seemed right that somebody would take a run at it, especially after the success of Airplane!, the now classic spoof of disaster movies.
Enter Mickey Rose‘s Student Bodies, a slapstick, sight-gage, horror flick that tries to Airplane! slasher flicks, movies that had come to set the standards for movies in the genre, including bouncy young women, randy sex-crazed boys, and maniacal, shadowy killers with some sort of behavioural tick. In this movie, that tick is his wheezy breathing, the poor sociopath not able to catch his breath.
Borrowing heavily from the fast-paced, blink and you’ll miss it comedy and jokes of Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, Student Bodies doesn’t quite have the same zing, its punchlines overplayed and most scenes running well past their expiry date. This leaves shots like its protracted opening running for ages and ages on a gag – repeated by Craven in Scream with Drew Barrymore – that stalls minutes after we already know where it’s going. And then it goes on even further.
Still, there’s a reason why the movie gained cult status, and it’s this cheesy sort of cross between teen sex romp and killer on the loose theme that keeps it kind of fun. With (and maybe take a breath here) cheerleaders and a marching band at a funeral, disabled kids fighting each other for designated parking (losing to a gorgeous girls who claims beauty is its own handicap), a tomato that is thrown (literally) through a speaker and flies into the face of the guy talking into the microphone in another room, and on-screen prompts that point out things like a door being unlocked, or the film’s body count, or a girl getting knocked in the head but assuring us it’s not important to the plot, and the sudden bit where the Breather’s hands – wearing green dishwashing gloves – offers sign language in the corner of the screen … there’s a lot going on. Plus, farts. Lots of farts. It’s goofy and well, really forced, but we have to remember, no one had done this before. Rose, who also wrote the script (and got help from an un-credited Michael Ritchie behind the camera) was blazing a whole new trail.
Perhaps most memorable is a brief appearance by the school’s janitor, Malvert, billed as being played by an actor called The Stick, a ridiculously gangly fellow with only two acting gigs to his name (he died young in 1989). He plays right into the tropes of the character very well, being decidedly creepy while pretty darned funny. He’s one of the actors you can’t peel your eyes off of, and gets the movie’s single best line.
What’s really fun though is of course the looking back, the film a time capsule of early 80s treasures, from clothing, to music, to dialogue, to hair, to well, just about any of it. It’s actually very well made so for fans of the era, it’s a like a scavenger hunt in all corners for wonders of the time. While it never gets the laughs it aims for, isn’t sexy, and worse, doesn’t have a single scary moment in it, the film is nonetheless a groundbreaker that is well worth reaching the bottom of a popcorn bucket for. Student Bodies may not be all the memorable, but as a piece of cinema history, it’s definitely one to watch, and if you’ve seen Scream, will clearly see some nods back to this one, the originator of the horror spoof.