Night School Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

Night School Blu-ray Movie Review

The Boston Slasher

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 1, 2017

Night School appeared in 1981, the same year as the first Friday the 13th sequel. It was a time when slasher films, and splatter cinema in general, were still treated with suspicion, if not outright condemnation, despite efforts by filmmakers like Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg to elevate the genre to an art form. Even today, when Friday the 13th has been accepted as a beloved franchise, and De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980) has been adopted by the Criterion Collection, along with Cronenberg's Scanners (1981), no one would mistake Night School for high art. It's a low-budget, unabashedly cheesy exploitation film that's a compendium of slasher cliches—but it has two things going for it. One is a brand of ghoulishly inventive humor that intermittently winks at the audience as if to say, "You're really enjoying this, aren't you?" The other is a young Rachel Ward, on the cusp of the stardom she would shortly achieve with The Thorn Birds and Against All Odds. Night School was Ward's first feature film, and she's the best thing in it (and not just for the extended nude scene).

A serial killer is stalking Boston, and the murders all bear a common signature: the head cleanly severed from the body and placed in an apparently random body of water, which can be as small as a bucket or as large as a pond. After the second murder, police detective Judd Austin (Leonard Mann) begins to focus on the all-girls Wendell College, at which the second victim was a night student. He becomes especially curious about the anthropology class taught by Professor Vincent Millett (Drew Snyder), who specializes in exotic rituals of primitive tribes. The professor has a reputation for sleeping with his students, despite the stern disapproval of Wendell's chief administrator, Miss Griffin (Annette Miller). He is shielded and supported by a stern but lovely British research assistant, Eleanor Adjai (Rachel Ward), whose shower scene allows director Ken Hughes to offer repeated nods to Hitchcock's Psycho, the granddaddy of all slasher cinema.

There isn't much to Night School beyond the increasingly elaborate killings. The film marks time between deaths with byplay between Det. Austin and his partner, Taj (Joseph R. Sicari), most of which revolves around Taj's ethnicity and Austin's Harvard degree; the latter is presumably meant to indicate that the detective is self-sacrificingly civic-minded, since he could obviously aspire to something grander than a job on the police force. (It's also clear—from his outfits, his BMW and his luxurious apartment—that Austin is independently wealthy.) There's an extended side plot involving Gary (Bill McCann), a creepy busboy at the local diner, whose stealthy interest in the lovely Eleanor is an obvious red herring. (Note the prominently placed hockey mask when the cops raid Gary's apartment; since it hadn't yet become Jason's signature uniform in the later Friday the 13th films, you could say that Night School was ahead of its time.) And, of course, Professor Millett's extracurricular activities provide suitable fodder for speculation as to the likelihood of his being the killer. Or perhaps it's Miss Griffin, whose own predilections turn out to be just as predatory as the professor's.

Still, for all the titillating side shows, bloody mayhem remains the heart of Night School. While Hughes doesn't employ the state-of-the-art prosthetics that made Friday the 13th a groundbreaking shocker, he gets plenty of mileage out of the sheer weirdness of the settings, which include the playground of a daycare center; the Boston Aquarium, where one of the victims works as a diver feeding the sea turtles; and the diner where Gary lurks. The establishment's kitchen become the scene of an extended game of "Where's the head?", when the proprietor opens up one morning, unaware that the killer has left a gruesome souvenir somewhere—somewhere—on the premises. Even Shakespeare used inadvertent cannibalism for shock effect, and if it was good enough for the Bard, certainly the creators of Night School are entitled to tease it.

Night School Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Night School was shot by Canadian cinematographer Mark Irwin, who has photographed numerous films for both David Cronenberg (including Scanners  and The Fly) and Wes Craven (including Wes Craven's New Nightmare and Scream). For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection, an interpositive was scanned at 2K by Warner's Motion Picture Imaging facility, followed by MPI's usual careful color correction and cleanup to remove dirt, scratches and age-related damage. (WAC previously released the film on DVD in 2011, but that master was reviewed and rejected as inadequate for Blu-ray.) The resulting image is unusually grainy for a WAC release, but I have been assured that the graininess accurately reflects the source, and WAC has not applied any form of grain- or noise-reduction. The grain may be heavy, especially in darker scenes, but it moves naturally and, unless one is allergic to such textures, the eye quickly adjusts to its presence. The film's palette is alternately dull, aptly capturing the Boston locations before the city's rebuilding boom, and lurid for scenes where violence occurs (or is hovering just outside the frame). The colors in a few locations (e.g., the aquarium) are almost surreal, and the nighttime streets are suffused with deep blue light to create a sense of danger. Blacks are deep, and detail is quite good, once you look past the grain.

With no extras other than a trailer, WAC has opted to place the 89-film on a BD-25, resulting in a slightly lower average bitrate than usual, but still high at just under 32 Mbps.

Night School Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Night School's mono audio has been taken from the magnetic master, cleaned of any age-related damage and encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. It's not an especially noteworthy soundtrack. The dynamic range is limited and the sound effects are minimally effective, but the dialogue is clearly rendered, and the score by Brad Fiedel (The Terminator) provides what assistance it can to the film's efforts at suspense. If nothing else, the track deserves good marks for accuracy.

Night School Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The sole supplement is a trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:26).

Night School Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Night School was the last film directed by Ken Hughes, and it's an odd entry in a filmography that boasts The Trials of Oscar Wilde and the Kim Novak/Lawrence Harvey version of Of Human Bondage. It's especially incongruous to find the writer/director of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang overseeing coeds being carved up, but Hughes throws himself into the proceedings with gusto. Night School isn't good, but it's a cult classic, and WAC has brought it to Blu-ray in all its low-budget glory. Recommended for slasher fans.