Leofwine_draca Wes Craven's 1996 film SCREAM is regarded by many as the first post-modern spoof of the overworked slasher genre, a film blurring the line between fact and fiction, riffing on many of the genre's conventions and throwing in plenty of in-jokes along the way. The truth is that RETURN TO HORROR HIGH, a largely forgotten 1987 spoof of the high school horror flick, did all that a full nine years beforehand. Comparing the two films today, it's easy to see why Craven's is the better film: it's entertaining throughout, witty and intelligent with a great script, loving and a classic. RETURN TO HORROR HIGH is none of those: it's a frequently dumb spoof that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction in a bad way, leaving the viewer scratching their head and wondering just what the heck is going on.Most of the clichés are present and correct here, but the central premise just isn't that appealing. I find the whole 'filming a movie that comes to life' type storyline pretty uninteresting, because it means there's always a small cast and the scenes are invariably repetitive. It's a case in point here: this is a film that looks and feels cheap throughout, with a no-name cast giving all kinds of lacklustre performances. The majority of viewers will be distracted in the first ten minutes by the pre-stardom performance from George Clooney, but he's quickly offed by the murderer.The film mixes fact and fiction in such a way that it's never really clear whether what you see is a flashback, a movie set, or real life. Of course, there are a string of inventive murders along the way, the best of which is when a biology professor is dissected just like a frog in his class. There are a few other fun bits here and there, but the film chooses to focus on the inane rather than the interesting and the presence of two completely uncharismatic leads ruin any entertainment value that this film might have had. Kudos for the creepy climax, which takes the shock ending of PSYCHO and ups the ante tenfold, but in the end RETURN TO HORROR HIGH is a missed opportunity and it took Craven to get the premise right when he made HIS slasher spoof.

Paul Andrews Return to Horror High is set in the town of Crippen where in 1982 a series of brutal murders were committed at Crippen High School, the killer was never caught. For the past three months a crew of filmmakers have been busy filming a low budget horror film that is based on the Crippen High School murders in the now abandoned school corridors of Crippen High. The police are called to the High School & find several mutilated bodies & only one survivor, the writer Arthur Lyman Kastleman (Richard Brestoff) who tells the tale of how he & the crew were making a horror film only to come to the realisation that a unknown killer has been murdering them one-by-one...Directed by Bill Froehlich & despite the title this is not a sequel to any other film, in fact you could say that it's a sort of crappy low budget forerunner to the self parodying likes of Scream (1996) as Return to Horror High is a film told almost entirely in flashbacks about a film within a film, if that makes sense. The whole narrative & structure of Return to Horror High is quite confusing & becomes annoying, for a start there's this framing device in which the police are rounding up bits of dead bodies while the lone survivor tells his tale of what happened (he also tells the cops things that he couldn't have known or wasn't there to see) so there's are numerous flashbacks & interruptions as the film switches back & forth between the two. Then there's the annoying situation where the majority of the flashbacks focus on a film crew making a horror film so just as a fairly long scene is playing out that you start to get into the director yells 'cut' & it turns out it was part of the film that they were making. While watching Return to Horror High a lot of these sequences felt like flashbacks to the original 1982 incident & it does become extremely irritating as scenes that you invest time in go nowhere & just end with someone yelling 'cut'. At over an hour & a half it's not like Return to Horror High needed padding out either, the character's are poor & the multiple twist endings are laughably bad. Are we really expected to believe an entire squad of cops can't tell any one of up to a dozen dead bodies are in fact still alive? Do any of these cops not know how to check for a pulse? Do any of these cops not find it strange that all these body parts are made from rubber? Are we to believe all these people manage to convince the cops they are dead for several hours? Also who was the killer? If he never killed anyone like the twist ending suggests then how did he get a huge spear through his chest? I honestly can't remember seeing the guy before he pops up at the end, I'm sure he was there someone but I just must have forgotten & I couldn't make any sense of his reasons for the murders or if he was responsible for the earlier 1982 killings or, well actually I think it's best not to try & make sense of the various twist endings (this thing just doesn't know when to quit!) as I think it might drive me insane. Life is too short. Return to Horror High wants to be everything, it wants to be an 80's slasher, it wants to be exploitative, it wants to be a murder mystery & it wants to poke fun at the genre with it's mocking of film crew clichés like the artistic director, the producer only interested in money & the self centered star in interested in becoming famous but it never succeeds in any aspect. It just doesn't work, it's painfully unfunny, the mystery is laughable & ridiculous while none of the killings are seen on screen (with good reason because of the twist ending) so it even lacks in the gore department. Also, if I might ask, what is a secret classroom doing under a real classroom? Does that make sense to anyone? Were they in the habit of building secret classrooms, maybe for students who wanted to be secretly taught?Return to Horror High tries to be funny, it tries too hard & as such just ends up predictable & quite forced. Because of the rubbish twist ending none of the kills are that gory since none of the victims actually died (so why did that guy get sucked down into the sandpit & why was that guy strung up & that large fan rolled towards him or why the lead actor was supposedly killed behind a door since no-one was there to witness any of it anyway & I assume that the so-called victims were in on the plan so what was the point of staging a fake murder when no-one was ever going to see it?) with a few splashed of fake blood, some severed limbs & a cut out heart shoved in some guy's mouth in the films single goriest moment. Return to Horror High is also the only slasher I can remember seeing where someone is killed by a sandpit. There's a fair amount of nudity as several of the girls show off their breasts.Apparently Return to Horror High had a decent budget but did nothing at the box-office when released, the most note worthy aspect of the acting is who turns up in this with Hollywood mega star George Clooney in an early role.Return to Horror High is a mess of concepts & genres that is a chore to watch with several awful twist endings that stretch credibility to the limit & you will have suspend all disbelief to be convinced by them. Not gory, not funny, not scary & definitely not as clever as it likes to think it is.

Michael_Elliott Return to Horror High (1987) ** (out of 4)Long before SCREAM and SCARY MOVIE we had this slasher/spoof that seems to be hated by pretty much everyone and misunderstood by even more. A movie crew shows up at a high school to film a movie based around the real life murders where of course the real killer was never captured. Soon more bodies begin to pile up but is it connected to the real events or is it just a movie? Just about every review you watch is going to really lay into this film but I didn't find it nearly as bad as its reputation. Yes, it's incredibly stupid but that's somewhat the point as it is making fun of the slasher genre. Do all the jokes work? Of course not but there were some minor good moments that make it a lot better than many of the films it spoofs. I think what does work is how the movie never really lets you know whether you're watching something real or if you just seeing a scene being shot. There were a couple moments that really caught me off guard as I thought I was watching something real but it turned out to be just part of the movie being filmed. This is naturally a cheat but it makes for some cheap fun. Another plus is seeing Marsha Brady (aka Maureen McCormick) playing a nutty cop who feels herself up a few times. There's also some mild charm of seeing a young George Clooney getting butchered in front of our eyes. He certainly doesn't show any signs of being a future Oscar-winner but we all have to start somewhere. There's also quite a bit of blood that got past the MPAA since (I'm guessing) many of the death scenes are done in a spoof way. What doesn't work is that the film runs way too long coming in at 91-minutes and much of the charm begins to wear thin after the first hour. Another problem is that none of the main characters are all that interesting with the exception being the director trying to make a classic film and the producer wanting gore and nudity to make money. Those who hate horror films certainly aren't going to change their minds with this film but fans of the genre can get a few cheap laughs here.

slayrrr666 "Return to Horror High" is a decently enjoyable cheesy slasher from the time.**SPOILERS**Following a grisly murder, film-makers Josh Forbes, (Scott Jacoby) and Freddie, (Dexter Hamlet) as well as the rest of their crew, Callie Cassidy, (Lori Lethin) Donny Porter, (Eric Kramer) Sheri Haines, (Darcy DeMoss) Stephen Blake, (Brendan Hughes) and Peter, (Larry Spinak) along with producer Harry Sleerik, (Alex Rocco) rent out the abandoned school where it happened for the shooting of a horror flick. As they're involved with the production, a rumor spreads about the school being the site of a series of murders years earlier, which Chief Deyner, (Pepper Martin) and Officer Tyler, (Maureen McCormick) begin to investigate after the fact. As the film shoot goes on, they suddenly start to realize that the film is being played out for real with a homicidal lunatic on the loose. With the struggle to finish the film coinciding with the disappearing cast, the race to solve both problems is tackled on both ends.The Good News: This here was a rather fine slasher with some good parts to it. The general humor and cheese that it has which give it most of it's watchability. The film has a fair share of jokes and gags in here, and most of them actually work, giving this one a really nice level of cheese when this one really decides to let loose with it. This is mostly used in the final half when it uses this to help make it far more entertaining through it's ridiculous cheese. From there, it has a bunch of fun from the relatively fun and enjoyable different amounts of action that the film has. It even features enough blood and gore in here to make it feel like one of the usual slashers with all of the blood and gore gags within. Featuring enough severed limbs, mutilated body parts, slicing, stabbings and much more in here, there's enough blood and guts that it manages to feel like an ordinary slasher of the time period. There's even enough some good decapitation effects here that manage to get some good fun from it. The cheesy scare effects, mainly the school room with the movie-shoot head popping out, and a later gag where a supposed flashback turns out to be a film-shot sequence involving gallons of paint used as blood on the set for the shot. Mixed together with it's incredibly fun last half, with the really good chase sequences coupled with the nudity and fun, give this one the best features.The Bad News: This one here doesn't have a whole lot of flaws, but the ones are pretty big. One of the big ones is that there's a couple of real parts here that don't make any sense at all. There are way too many flashbacks, nightmares and scenes from the movie-within-the-movie to keep track. Why there's any need for it to do this is never explained, and why there's nothing to explain what the purpose is. The fact that this one really should've had one that kept the style in check and only used one rather than switching between the three, and even worse is that choosing between them is incredibly hard to do. It uses them at random to stick in plot points but trying to decide which one it actually is manages to work into a real headache at times. Another annoying thing about it though is how it constantly jumps between plots. We start out with the police investigation of the murders, then we go back to the horror film production, and then back once more to the murders the film is based on, which turns out to be the movie being made. It sounds confusing, and it is. It is just incredibly confusing to decide what's going to happen through the different plots that there's nothing at all to determine the order of what's going on in the order of the plot. This one here is really confusing and manages to get the differences along the way really hard to pick out. The mask in here is quite terrible and really looks quite cheap with the way it appears. The last flaw is the terribly aggravating series of twists at the end that just go on-and-on without accomplishing anything. It's a series of one lame twist after another, and it ends the film on a sour note. These here work against the film.The Final Verdict: A rather good cheesy entry in the slasher genre at the time, if only it would've had a more sensible plot and no confusion. Still, give this one a chance if in the mood for these kinds of films or enjoy slashers as a whole, while those who will not appreciate the cheese or prefer more serious ones should heed caution.Rated R: Violence, Nudity and Language