Night School 4K 1981 Ultra HD 2160p

A ruthless killer, dressed head to toe in leather, beheads women attending night school at the college. A typical massacre.

User Review

An average film with good potential but a less-than-successful execution—and one that lacks a well-thought-out plot to boot. And yet the director is none other than Ken Hughes—the man behind the comedy version of *Casino Royale*, the first to bring Bond to the big screen, and a name that will go down in history forever! Perhaps horror isn’t his forte, but then why even bother making a movie like this? On top of that, this is his final film, which makes it all the more disappointing to see such a weak effort cap off a director’s filmography!

And at first glance, everything seems to be right where it should be: a mysterious maniac in a black jacket and a motorcycle helmet (a nod to the horror film *Undress for the Killer*), murders involving decapitation, a substantial mystery plot instead of yet another group of naive teenagers, erotic scenes in the bathroom, the mystery of the maniac’s identity, numerous victims spaced out at roughly equal intervals throughout the plot—keeping things from getting boring during the investigation. Everything seems fine on the surface, but the film is so boring and uninspiring!

Let’s start with the fact that the movie lacks any sense of intrigue whatsoever! No sooner does the plot begin to piece together a basic connection between the victims, no sooner does a certain character appear on screen, than all suspicion immediately falls solely on him. Any further pretense of mystery is pointless—it’s as if the detective understands even less about the investigation than the average viewer, and the screenwriters have never read a single mystery novel in their lives! The intended surprise here isn’t the revelation of the culprit’s identity, but apparently a twist at the end with a red herring—yet this comes across as even more naive and utterly botched!

At best, the plot characters are fleshed out for three or four people—and even then, they’re very formulaic, with no attention paid to individual quirks or acting. No, in practically any slasher—especially one about a group of teenagers—it’s sometimes silly to expect even basic acting, but that’s precisely the main problem with this horror flick: it tries with all its might not to be what it actually is. It deliberately tries to defy the rules of the genre, loudly claiming to be original.
And as a result, without the clichés, it becomes even more boring.

Absolutely all the murders take place off-screen, and of course, Hughes isn’t Dario Argento, and "Night School" isn’t the brilliant Trauma, where heads are regularly sawed off in detailed close-ups—but they could have at least filmed some special effects for the violent scenes! What saves the subpar visuals is at least the presence of blood; quite often, before decapitation, the victim manages to be wounded and cut up quite a bit.
The characters, however, behave absurdly and overact wildly, making little effort to resist. In the final scene on the bed, instead of a human scream, the sound designers slip in the squeal of a pig, which triggers fits of laughter during what should be a tense murder scene. Even the nudity isn’t entirely smooth—before the bathroom scene reaches its beautifully erotic climax, the director takes quite a while to tease the audience and play it coy.

The plot holes are also striking at times, and the characters’ illogical behavior only adds to the confusion. It’s not all that absurd, but at times the patches used to cover the plot holes plunge the film so deeply into contrivance that it’s hard to take it seriously—and it doesn’t even try to be a comedy. It would be fine if it were at least funny, but what’s happening is just plain silly!

However, it seems that much of this film was inspired by the wonderful "Amsterdam Nightmare". At the very least, a great deal of it is similar, and the action-packed chase that appears in the finale of *Nightmare*—a thrilling pursuit through the canals—only serves to further confuse the genre of this film.

How could they take such a great set of ideas and execute them so clumsily?! Why even tackle a genre when you don’t really understand it at all? It failed to create a horror film, a thriller, or even a giallo. Something halfway between them—loosely attributed to the conventions of slasher movies—was cobbled together from the necessary elements, but with poor quality and the wrong proportions. An ugly homunculus worth a glance in the “museum” of horror films, but you certainly wouldn’t want to linger near it or add a copy to your home collection as a souvenir! A forgettable and very weak film.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (87.9 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Info Audio

#English: FLAC 1.0
#English: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Audio commentary track with director of photography Mark Irwin and film historian Bryan Thomas Norton)
#English: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Audio commentary track with associate producer Leon Williams, stuntman Jeffrey Leavitt, and film historian Bryan Thomas Norton)

Info Subtitles