Andrea (Virginia Madsen) has won a scholarship to attend a prestigious Prep School full of rich and entitled kids. It’s an opportunity at a step-up for her future and she grabs onto it with great gusto. This means, of course, leaving her current boyfriend behind, and he’s not too happy about it, constantly trying to talk her out of going/staying. She is determined, however, and fits in right away with a group of groovy friends and a teacher that is making eyes at her. Soon she finds out that not all is at it appears, as a delinquent rebel is suddenly and mysteriously behaving, his attitude and personality almost completely changed. That’s right, the teachers and staff are performing somewhat-lobotomies on the brains of trouble students, making them perfect, obedient robots. Oh, and they’re also using these bits of brains to manufacture some sort of serum that keeps them alive, maybe forever. This wackiness and more can be your viewing pleasure, if you choose to dive into the world of Zombie High.
This is a movie that I almost rented dozens of times back in the 80s. It had cool box art and man, I had a huge crush on Virginia Madsen. But something always stayed my hand. I didn’t trust the movie. Turns out, I had good instincts. This is an 80s horror/comedy that remembered to bring the 80s, but like, totally forgot to bring the horror and the comedy. It’s full of weird pastels and tinny, trebly pop music, as well as big hair and that wacky fashion of the time, which makes it kind of fun. What it doesn’t have is a coherent plot (the staff are vampires of a sort? they control the students via music constantly playing on campus? they do these behavior-modification brain surgeries for what purpose?), humor (it tries, and every now and again will strike the funny bone, but mostly it’s lame), or horror. Yeah, it’s not scary at all. Madsen is just fine in her role, as is everyone else, really, but it’s hard to get past the icky teacher-grooming-the-teen-student thing that’s at the center of story. It’s mitigated somewhat by the fact that Madsen looks like she’s in her mid-twenties, not a teenager, but still. The movie tries to make a go of it in the final thirty minutes, where it dumps a bunch of insane action and set-pieces, in an attempt to save the film, but it’s not enough. What this movie needed was lots of sex, lots of gore, and they should have amped-up the weirdness factor. Take the brain and guts of Society and slap them into this supposed satire, and you would have had a cult classic.
Sadly, Zombie High wasn’t much fun. It isn’t a particularly bad film (okay, maybe it is), and it means well, but man is it hamstrung by some weird desire to remain palatable to the masses. This is a flick that should have thrown caution to the wind, cranked up the nudity and violence, and just gone for it. The basic structure of a fun, satirical movie is there, but it’s a skeleton that, sadly, was never fleshed out. Oh, and the “zombies?” Lame.
★★☆☆