As we started to watch 1984’s Splatter University, Jeff warned me that, “This is not a great movie.”

I laughed.  “Hey,” I said, “I just watched Satan’s Children.  How bad can it be?”

I looked at the screen and was immediately confronted by a poorly animated picture of the New York Skyline.

“Oh crap,” I said.

Four words appeared on screen: “A Troma Team Release”

“Oh, no!” I shouted….

Still, I’m not one to stop watching a film once it starts so I watched the entirety of Splatter University.  Fortunately, it was only 78 minutes long and, regardless of what else one might say about it, it did not waste much time getting to the murders.  Within the opening few minutes, an orderly in a mental hospital got stabbed in the crotch, with the camera zooming in on the blood spurting out from his groin,  The patient who stabbed him took the orderly’s clothes (which, quite frankly, should have been covered in blood so I’m not sure that they would actually be the ideal disguise) and makes his escape.

Three years later, a sociology professor is brutally stabbed to death in her classroom at St. Trinian’s College and again, the camera zooms in on the spurting blood, as if to make sure that no one accuses the film of lying about the “splatter” part.  Her quickly-hired replacement is Julie Parker (Forbes Riley), who soon notices that someone seems to be murdering her students.  Being a good teacher, Julie decides to protect her students by figuring out who the murderer is at St. Trinian’s College.  Fortunately, there aren’t that many suspects, for two reasons.  Number one, the students and faculty die with such frequency that it’s easy to guess who is responsible by process of elimination.  Number two, it appears that the makers of this film could only afford a handful of actors.  St. Trinian’s appears to have about twenty students and most of them appear to be in their early forties.

On the one hand, as I mentioned previously, Splatter University does live up to its name.  It’s obvious that the production didn’t have a huge budget but it appears that the majority of what the filmmakers did have was spent on fake blood and entrails because a lot of blood is spilled and one particularly gruesome scene even involves intestines spilling out of a body.  Agck!  (Seriously, the sight of the large intestine always freaks me out.)  I really can’t fault the film as a slasher flick, even if the killer’s identity is obvious.  That said, this was still a Troma release and, as such, there’s a lot about it that sucks.  Apparently, the original film was too short so Troma added some badly acted, “comedic” scenes of the students acting stupid.  Those scenes pad out the film’s length but they also screw with the pacing and they distract the viewer from what is otherwise a crudely affective, low-budget American giallo film.  But that’s Troma for you!

(And, let’s be honest — how can you not love Lloyd Kaufman?)