Directed By: Herb Freed
Starring: Christopher George, Patch Mackenzie, E. Danny Murphy
Tag line: "This is one school you won't want to graduate from!"
Trivia: The blonde girl in the number 46 track jersey was cut out of the film as much as possible since she was fired due to refusal to fulfill the nudity requirements
If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear that, based on its opening sequence, 1981’s Graduation Day was a sports movie. Interspersed between scenes of teenage athletes competing in track and field as well as gymnastics are shots of a cheering crowd, rooting them on to victory, all as an inspirational rock ballad titled “The Winner” fills the soundtrack. Yet as exciting as some of these events are, the real drama occurs later on in the scene, when coach George Michaels (Christopher George) spurs on his star runner, high school senior Laura (Ruth Ann Llorens), during a sprint race. As her teammates cheer wildly, Laura pulls away from the pack and crosses the finish line ahead of the competition. Her victory soon turns to tragedy, however, when, moments later, she collapses, the victim of a fatal blood clot.
And just like that, the tone of Graduation Day changes drastically.
Several months pass, and Laura’s classmates are preparing for their upcoming graduation. To accept Laura’s diploma on her behalf, her sister, Navy Ensign Anne Ramstead (Patch Mackenzie), returns home, and with the help of Laura’s boyfriend Kevin (E. Danny Murphy), sets out to find those responsible for her beloved sister’s death. Like everyone else, Anne focuses her attention on Coach Michaels, who, due to the outcry that followed the tragedy, has been given his walking papers (though he insists Laura’s death was an unfortunate accident, and had nothing to do with his strict training regimen). At the same time this is going on, the other members of the school’s track team are being slaughtered by an unknown assailant. Who is it that’s killing them, and how (if at all) does this recent string of murders relate to what happened to Laura?
Released in 1981, Graduation Day has quite a bit in common with the slasher films of that particular era; along with its homicidal maniac hunting teenagers, several kills occur in the middle of a wooded area (a la Friday the 13th) that’s adjacent to the school. And like other slashers, some of the kill scenes are damned creative (the most imaginative of the bunch involves a bed of nails, strategically placed for maximum effect). But there are elements of Graduation Day that also make it feel like an early ‘70s Giallo film, from its killer wearing black gloves to the red herrings thrown in throughout the movie, during which we realize any one of a number of people could be the killer.
Therein lies one of the main problems I had with Graduation Day: it simply had too many characters. Aside from those mentioned above (including the entire track team), we have a school principle (Michael Pataki) who’s sleeping with his secretary (E.J. Peaker); a music teacher (Richard Balin) who’s seduced by Dolores (Linnea Quigley), one of his students hoping a quick roll in the hay will help her pass his class; a security guard (Virgil Frye) that doesn’t take his job as seriously as he should; Anne’s mom Elaine (Beverly Dixon) and her hard-drinking new stepfather Ronald (Hal Bokar); and police Inspector Halliday (Carmen Argenziano), who’s been contacted by a number of concerned parents worried because their son or daughter didn’t return home the night before (and with good reason.. they were dead) . There’s even a crazy old woman (Kevin’s grandmother, played by Viola Kates Stimpson) and a pair of chatty teenage girls that turn up all the time (one of the two was played by future Wheel of Fortune co-star Vanna White, in one of her earliest screen roles). To his credit, director Herb Freed does a solid job fleshing most of these individuals out, but in the end, the movie would have improved if a few of these superfluous characters had been left on the cutting room floor.
Still, thanks to its various kill scenes and an ending that’s bat-shit crazy, Graduation Day manages to overcome its problems, and while I wouldn’t call it a top-tier slasher (or, for that matter, a top-tier Giallo), it’s an entertaining film nonetheless.