Film Review: After School Massacre (2014)

SYNOPSIS:

After being fired, a high school educator goes on a killing spree, stalking his former female students at their slumber party.

REVIEW:

After School Massacre is an exceptionally terrible shot-on-video film in which a disgruntled high school teacher’s aide goes on a killing spree after the Dean fires him for being tricked into accepting a student’s friend request on Facebook.

In the vein of typical slasher fare, the film surrounds a group of girls having parties and getting wasted while arguing over personal drama until a masked maniac comes to kill them all. In the case of this film it is a teacher’s aide, Bruce Kade as Mr. Anderson, who is fired after Dean Wheatley, played by Art Roberts, connects Anderson with a student on Facebook. This sets Anderson over the edge and causes him to kill the Dean and a witness to the murder.

The story does start out innocently enough, trying to make Anderson seem like a hard working man and keeping himself at an appropriate distance from students, yet his change in attitude is quickly and absurdly turned only by virtue of bad writing and acting in the scene he shares with the Dean.

While the story jumps back and forth from the main plot of Anderson’s killings, we are given a window into the party lives of Jess Perkins, played by Savvy Matlow, and her friends. The film starts with a party in which a new student, Erica, kills herself after her boyfriend leaves her.

Despite the drama from the suicide girl at their last party and the killings on campus, Jess and her friends decide to party anyways, playing host to her sister Dee Dee, played by Simone Wasserman, and her boyfriend Luke, as played by Andrew Phillips.

The party has the standard drinking and crude attitude between the one male at the party and the various girls acting out. Events slowly build in the typical manner as Anderson kills them off one by one and even some characters unlucky enough to show up such as a random pizza delivery man and one of two boys named Max, as played by Lonnie Alcide Gardner.

Much of the film is set without build up besides the killing and the clearly moronic behavior of the main characters until they talk about some of the side elements of the film, such as how Lindsay Lamb who plays Laura was the girl responsible for getting in between Erica and her boyfriend, leading her to suicide and the feelings both Jess and her friend Devon, played by Nikole Howell, have for Anderson before events escalate in the film.

There is little actual plot here, the acting is wooden and clunky while the film itself is shot on a home video camera of sorts so the quality of footage is nothing to be proud of. Effects such as blood and gore are muted heavily by whatever restrictions Jared Masters, the writer and Director, set up as their budget if they had one to begin with.

The only notable moments of the film are one or two funny scenes. the first is when Anderson kills Dee Dee with a mailbox he pulls out of the ground and impales her with, which is humorous in that of all the things he could use a mailbox was the most convenient.

The second is when the other boy who was peeping in on the party named Joel, played by Nick Sinise, gets so drunk that he passes out in the garage where Anderson has stored one of the bodies and he proceeds to cuddle with it, assuming she is passed out too.

There are many films like this out there with little to no real plot, simple violence and sex peppered in to give it the slasher edge and unlikable characters that we would like to see be punished at best and at worst just want off the screen so we don’t have to look at them. This film in and of itself does no harm but as long as people continue to watch bad films like this there will be people who will make them and think they are wanted. This isn’t even worth borrowing from a friend unfortunate enough to have a copy.