Graduation Day (1981) — the movie that makes you question whether high school sports are really about teamwork, or if they’re just elaborate auditions for Saw: High School Edition. Let’s unpack this gem of early-’80s horror incompetence with all the subtlety of a fencing sword to the throat.
First off, the premise: a masked killer is stalking the high school track team just days before graduation. And why? Because some poor girl, Laura, collapses from a cardiac embolism, which apparently is enough to trigger a homicidal rampage that makes you think gym class should come with a mandatory mental health waiver. Never mind years of counseling or common sense — clearly the only response to teenage athletic tragedy is death by steel spike, sword, or random pole vaulting accident.
The cast is a who’s-who of early ‘80s B-level actors and future game-show hosts, including Vanna White, Linnea Quigley, and Karen Abbott — all here to demonstrate that screaming dramatically in locker rooms and wooded trails counts as acting. Christopher George’s Coach Michaels straddles the line between morally incompetent gym teacher and action hero who somehow survives long enough to get shot by the inspector. Meanwhile, Kevin, played by E. Danny Murphy in his debut, is your classic psycho-boyfriend-supplied-by-budgetary-necessity — madly in love with a corpse, mentally unhinged, and apparently trained in pole-vault murder tactics.
The killings themselves are… inventive, if your idea of inventive is “let’s see how many ways a teenager can die while exercising.” Fencing swords, steel spikes, decapitations, metal-spiked footballs — it’s like someone raided the sports equipment closet with homicidal intent. And yet, somehow, all of it is staged with the grace of a high school pep rally, complete with awkward jogging shots and badly lit woods. One can almost hear the director whispering, “Let’s make the suspense palpable… and hope no one notices the fake blood is just ketchup.”
Plot-wise, Graduation Day suffers from the classic slasher ailment: a convoluted killer reveal that’s simultaneously ridiculous and confusing. Kevin kills everyone and then Anne and Halliday follow a trail of spike-laden bodies to confront him, only for the audience to question if anyone in this town has ever heard of calling the police before it’s too late. And of course, there’s the pièce de résistance: the killer’s undead girlfriend in a graduation cap, because nothing screams “high school melodrama” like corpse cosplay.
Yet, despite the narrative chaos and the budget-friendly gore, this film grossed nearly $24 million. Which makes sense: people love watching teenagers die in increasingly elaborate ways, especially when the direction is as shaky as a freshman on the uneven bars. It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching a badly planned track meet where everyone keeps falling on spikes, but with more screaming.
In conclusion, Graduation Day is a masterclass in early-80s slasher absurdity. It’s loud, blood-soaked, and narratively negligent, with enough death-by-sports-equipment to make you reconsider your childhood PE classes. It’s a film that doesn’t so much scare as it does inspire existential dread: why did anyone ever think pole vault pits filled with steel spikes were a good idea?
