SPLATTER UNIVERSITY (1984)
Article 5070 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-4-2016
Directed by Richard W. Haines
Featuring Forbes Riley, Ric Randig, Dick Biel
Country: USA
What it is: Slasher film

A paranoid schizophrenic escapes from a mental hospital. Three years later, students and teachers at a university are being knocked off by a serial killer. Who could it be?

Sometimes a title will tell you all you need to know. Just looking at the title of this one, I figured it would be a not-very-good slasher movie. And, sure enough, that’s what I got – a not-very-good slasher movie. I had the killer picked out ten seconds into the character’s first scene, and that was before the movie began bending over backwards to try to convince me it was someone else. To give you an idea of the sloppiness of the production, there’s a scene where two women are having a conversation on a park bench, and it keeps cutting back and forth between two camera angles, one of which has a purple filter and the other of which does not. The movie is loaded with tiresome, uninteresting characters, especially when it comes to the students. I’ll give the movie credit for having one surprise up its sleeve; unfortunately, it’s so late in the game that it can’t compensate for the dullness and predictability of the rest of it. Don’t enroll.