Student Bodies

I spent the weekend mostly not writing. I did watch an old movie called Student Bodies, which I used to watch with friends at parties, senior year in high school. I have no idea why it was a favorite of ours, although the sophomoric humor was highly quotable. I hadn't seen it since sometime before graduation. It's a spoof of slasher movies from 1981, long before Scream and the Scary Movie series.

Like many horror films, it says right at the beginning that it is based on a true story: that 26 horror films had been released the previous year and none of them lost money.

My favorite moment is probably when the killer telephones a room full of teachers. They all look at the phone and a middle-aged woman deadpans: "I'll get it, I'm furthest from the phone." Not sure why, but that still cracks me up.

I looked it up on IMDB, and was not surprised to find that most of the cast never worked again. I was surprised to find that the writer and co-director of the movie was Mickey Rose, the former writing partner of Woody Allen who co-penned Bananas and Take the Money and Run. The other director, uncredited on this film, was Michael Ritchie. Ritchie had already directed The Bad News Bears, among others, and was on his way to directing Fletch and a ton of other projects, mostly comedies. It would be easy to watch the movie and assume that nobody involved with it was a professional of any stripe.

Anyway, it was fun from a nostalgia standpoint. And I suppose, in its sad little way, this 25-year-old low-budget slasher parody was probably the highlight of my weekend.