An absolutely wonderful film. Earnestly insane. You think you know what kind of movie it is, then it turns the wheel harder into the wild, and then it takes the wheel and just flails it back and forth into an unrecognizable and uncategorized form of lunacy.

Massacre at Central High is about a morally-driven homicidal psychopath domestic terrorist who is kind of the good guy. It asks deep questions about humanity and about how the hero can become the villain, the underprivileged can become the privileged and how the haves will always bully the have-nots, even if who fills those roles is fluid. Peace is never an option. Crime, punishment and a god-like retribution will always play catchup to our sins. And it does all this within the poorly-acted flubbed lines, wildly unmotivated photography and jackhammer messaging that makes exploitation cinema so beautiful

Criterion just released this in their collection of High School Horror. Enjoy.

Truly unhinged 70s afterschool special with “we live in a society” political undertones. Groovy.

Like Heathers but it’s white boys who hang glide

What
The
FUCK
WAS 
THAAAAAT.
this movie was like a dramatic recreation of my anxiety as a 5th grader terrified of high school bullies and just the whole Grade 9-12 culture.
Everything that happens in this teenage nightmare is just so casual…casual acting, casual violence, casual visuals, casual sex, casual score, which adds to the casual menace and dread. 
The music choices are CHOICES (apparently not the directors but the rest of the movie is so insane it kinda works.
Worst (best) bullies in film? 
Ray Underwood bullied so James Spader could smarm.
Needs to be seen to be believed.

Fascism is a botched Triple Lindy. I've always been vaguely unimpressed by the idea that this is stealthily about authoritarianism hiding in plain sight or that it's somehow formally elevated above its exploitation roots. Since we never see any adult or law enforcement I'm not sure you can make coherent analogs to existing power structures, and so to me it's just about some asshole punks. Indeed they do get up to some gnarly mischief but they're also really just petulant jerks engaged in animal-pack games of dominance, and the women are mostly tokens. It's satisfyingly violent but not particularly thorny. Believe it or not the phony Italian spliced-hardcore version, SEXY JEANS, is uglier and sort of more on point. I dunno I don't really like HEATHERS all that much either.

criterion channel's entry into the shlock horror of the decade awards is a bloody mess of 70s styling and creative murderisation, and it's 100% pure art

Unclassifiable exploitation that nastily transforms an alien’s idea of an after-school special into a bloody, sexually aggressive treatise on cyclical fascism, interrogating who you perceive as the hero in these sorts of crude revenge stories anyway. There is no authority above these spoiled brats’ horny whims, as no adult is ever visible onscreen, even after several students are dispatched in gruesome, explosive fashion. Keep seeing folks compare this to HEATHERS, but I kept thinking about TOP OF THE HEAP, as this is surreal and sincerely sad and just so angry about the culture it exists in. Your big brother/bodyguard becomes an erratic agent of chaos. Everybody sells out. Nobody will really learn anything in the end. A great example of a cheap thrill assigning its own worth while still delivering the sleazy goods you pulled into the drive-in for.