Don’t go to the swamp tonight, indeed!

Actually, that’s pretty good advice in general.  Swamps are dangerous.  They’re full of malaria-carrying flies and crocodiles and ghosts of angry Cajuns.  Of course, none of those show up in the 1989 slasher film Hell High.  In fact, there’s only one scene set in a swamp and that scene happens during the day.

It involves a little girl who is out in the swamp, playing with her doll and watching two teenage lovers get killed as the result of a macabre motorcycle accident.  It’s a pretty disturbing sight, especially since one of the lovers ends up getting impaled and spitting blood all over the place.  BLEH!

Anyway, that girl grows up to be a high school science teacher named Brooke Storm (Maureen Mooney).  She’s a good teacher but she’s also extremely repressed and haunted by the image of that impaled girl spitting up blood.  Unfortunately, one of her students is a sociopath named Dickens (Christopher Stryker).  Dickens is the type of student who goes to football games just so he can threaten the injured players with a gigantic switchblade.  Oddly, no one seems to notice Dickens standing on the sidelines, holding a gigantic knife over a helpless jock.  At first I thought that this meant that Dickens was meant to be either a ghost or a figment of someone’s imagination but no, Dickens is real.  I guess people are just so used to being threatened by Dickens that no one even notices anymore.

Anyway, Dickens has three friends.  Queenie (Millie Prezioso) is the tough girl who bares her breasts to anyone who stops by her house.  Smiler (Jason Brill) is the fat guy who is always smiling, no matter how upset he is.  Smiler continually says things like, “What’s gotten into that Dickens?” and “My mamma said there’d be days like this.”  And then there’s Jon-Jon (Christopher Cousins).  Jon-Jon is Dickens’s newest friend.  Jon-Jon’s a good kid but a little weak-willed.  He’s got a crush on Queenie and Dickens seems to have a crush on him.

Anyway, Dickens and his friends decide to play a prank on Miss Storm but, in the process of doing so, they cause her to have flashbacks to that day in the swamp.  And soon, Miss Storm is stalking all four of them.  How dangerous is Miss Storm?  Well, she’s dangerous enough that she can kill you with a number two pencil.  You think Liam Neeson was a creative and relentless killing machine in Taken?  He’s got nothing on Brooke Storm!

Anyway, Hell High is kind of an oddity.  On the one hand, it’s pretty much a standard slasher film.  On the other hand, the film has just enough strange moments to distinguish it.  Yes, there’s Dickens with the knife on the football field.  But there’s also Smiler with his nonstop grin.  And Queenie with her relentless mood swings.  And there’s the strangely 0ff-kilter dialogue, which is full of random song lyrics.  And then there’s the film’s twist ending, which makes little sense but it is still satisfying in its own over the top way.  Hell High is a thoroughly odd but undeniably effective 80s horror film.

A lot of the credit has to go to the film’s cast, all of whom give far better performances than the material really deserves.  Maureen Mooney is both scary and sympathetic as poor Miss Storm while Christopher Cousins is likable as the somewhat weak-willed Jon-Jon.  The film, however, is truly dominated by Christopher Stryker.  Stryker goes all out as the crazy Dickens and it’s unfortunate that he died shortly after Hell High was released.  Had he lived, he’d probably now be a Sid Haig-style character actor, popping up in indie horror movies and Quentin Tarantino films.

So, watch Hell High if you get a chance and definitely stay out of the swamp tonight!