Slaughter High! Die! Die! Die!

Slaughter High is a cynical, semi-parody, slasher flick set in a suburban high school. Eight high school seniors receive a text message to show up after classes or risk being exposed for cheating on last semester’s math final exam. We learn the wannabe entrepreneur of the bunch stole the answer sheet and sold the answers to the other seven students. When one of them informed their math teacher Mr. Patterson, he gave his pupils the opportunity to take a new exam. But instead, they decided to accuse him of sexual harassment which led to his termination and a downward spiral. And now an unknown killer puts the school in lockdown mode and begins meting out justice to the guilty teens. The narrative doesn’t follow the tired conventions of highlighting someone to root for or fabricating contrived character arcs. The teens for the most part are obnoxious and dim-witted. They are going to die (in suitably gruesome fashion) and the fun is in watching them being dispatched one by one. As for the killer, Larry, he’s the widowed husband of the late Mr. Patterson – who committed suicide two weeks prior. Larry recently won the Mega Millions lottery jackpot. So he’s got plenty of cash to enlist the services of the local sheriff, who happens to be the brother of Mr. Patterson, along with the school's principal – a Christian fundamentalist with a peculiar sense of morality. Larry plans to avenge the injustice perpetrated on his hubbie before flying off in the sunset to a Caribbean island he purchased with his lottery winnings. As one would expect from a tale populated with hormonal teens, there are hookup attempts, jealousies and bickering, and even murder by speargun. Tara is the closest thing the plot has to a protagonist – bothered by a nagging conscience over what the kids did to Mr. Patterson. But even after blowing up Larry with a hand grenade (procured from the janitor’s office) she won’t survive the night.