HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 53
5th of 8 films from 1981

If you thought I wasn't going to use this "films from 1981" Hooptober rule to expand my slasher cred, well... you were wrong, because I am, so there!

I have actually managed to see Herb Freed film before, 1980's Beyond Evil which isn't great, and Graduation Day exhibits the same fairly shoddy direction and feeling of cheapness, such as you'd expect from an ex-rabbi without a huge amount of resources at his disposal.

However, it turns out Herb had a secret weapon: knowledge. Which he obtained via: research. And refined with: analysis. What the fuck am I talking about, I hear you sigh? Well, accounts vary a little. On the one hand Herb Freed has claimed that he was unaware of the slasher boom that he released Graduation Day in the middle of. On the other hand, other sources have suggested that Herb and his wife spent hours watching said slashers and timed the frequency of the kills with a stopwatch. Correlating these observations with some kind of perceived evaluation of each film's worth (I suspect monetarily), Freed developed a bullet-proof formula which would ensure his film's success.

And you know what? I think it fucking worked! Yes, his main concern was money, and Graduation Day made a decent return, apparently. But from an entertainment point of view, this thing just hums along.

It doesn't make a lot of sense. Every character acts in an utterly bizarre fashion, favouring vicious take-downs of each other rather than any kind of naturalistic dialogue. Along with the rather cruddy production design, cinematography and sound mix, this might have failed to deliver the requisite charm. But the kills in this film are fun - some of them are great, in fact - and the pacing! There was definitely something in that patented Herb Freed formula, because this movie never ceases to be enormously entertaining.

We also get a fun cast including Christopher George (who's always a welcome sight in any cheap horror movie) and a quite young Linnea Quigley (who landed the role when someone else refused to do the nudity - turns out Linnea was OK with that, who knew?). One of the key teen characters literally looks about forty years old, it's even more egregious than Caroline Munro being cast as a teen in Slaughter High a few years later.

I don't know what it is about 1981 slashers, but I am developing a theory that even the lesser ones were pretty great in their own way. This is a theory I intend to test thoroughly.