Director: Liam Regan
Year: 2022
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher; Horror/Comedy
Plot:
Trying to get by in life, a vegan high school student finds that the recent school administration’s change of powers into a different mindset allowing students to prepare for a special massacre of the student body comes at the expense of her burgeoning interest in a new teacher on campus.
Review:
This was a delightfully unhinged and trashy genre effort. Among its better aspects comes from the deranged storyline that allows for such an off-kilter atmosphere that slowly becomes more enjoyable the more it goes along. The universe presented here, featuring a new headmaster at an unruly high school providing a chance for the students to explore the more violent and unhinged side of their behavior with an open invitation to go into their baser instincts committing acts of carnage and mass violence against each other in the name of entertainment, creates a fantastic starting point to everything. With students openly encouraging murder, cannibalism, sexual kinks, and other forms of debauchery in the name of committing the most insane acts possible, so that it creates the kind of anything-goes universe possible, this is a fantastic idea to present everything possible in an unnatural light.
Moreover, once this has been established, the rest of the film’s story comes together finely. With the exploits of the contest drawing her into a more overtly cannibalistic-centered lesbian relationship with the new teacher coming on the staff, the glee with which they start killing off and devouring the other students around them to the point of rendering them unable to partake in the massive ceremony, everything is built upon. The rest of the student body and faculty here dive into everything with as much glee and unbridled abandon that it all helps to make everything feel that much more impassioned as the outwardly bizarre behavior of brazenly unconventional sexual relationships, admitted murder, and proposing cannibal massacres on others is treated with such a sense of the ordinary that it helps bring the idea together.
The other fun part here is the attempts at diving into the radicalized genre atmosphere within this setup. The series of interactions and confrontations with the student body that start her descent into cannibalism, whether it’s the ambush on the jock boyfriend in her bedroom that results in him being dismembered into pieces, the slaughter at the diner when her and the teacher come together for the first time, or the montage of scenes showing them slaying the human body around campus in a series of bizarre and over-the-top setpieces. The bonkers finale, featuring a series of bizarre rituals, tons of bonkers behavior being treated as normal, and tons of shocking revelations wrapped up with some great bloodshed, makes for a lot to like overall. It might all be too much for some to take, especially when wrapped up with its overtly obvious low-budget limitations on display, but it’s not that detrimental.
Overview: *****/5
A wonderfully chaotic over-the-top genre effort, there’s quite a lot to enjoy here as it’s one of the finer examples of this particular genre around without much in the way of holding it down. Give it a shot if this kind of wacky, bizarre genre fare is appealing, appreciate the style attempted here, or are fans of the creative crew, while those turned off by these factors should heed caution.
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