René Daalder died five years ago and made eight films, separated evenly by decades. Massacre at Central High stands out among his work and other nihilistic 1970s exploitation movies, on a level of cruelty with The Candy Snatchers, Malibu High, and Switchblade Sisters (if not as well-made). It’s Daalder’s, peer of Jan De Bont and Paul Verhoeven, most widely-seen film. Released the same year as Carrie, Massacre at Central High is far meaner than De Palma’s classic, showing a world without adults, just amoral teenagers who simply don’t know right from wrong. Derrel Maury plays the main murderous kid, an actor with an uncanny resemblance to someone slightly older: Darwin Joston, star of Assault on Precinct 13, also released in 1976; he appeared in Eraserhead the following year.
These “kids”—all pushing 30—wander in and out of the flatly-lit blue classrooms plotting random acts of violence against each other while preening about in polyester. The movie is rickety as hell, with an ambitious director of photography (Bertram van Munster) who can’t quite pull off some of the relatively sophisticated camera movements with such weak exploitation actors. Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith stands out here—she’s the reason I watched it in the first place—and while she’s by far the most interesting person on screen, she’s clearly sick of cranking out these teen T&A movies; she filmed this back-to-back with Drum, the sequel to Mandingo, and in 1977 she appeared in Robert Aldrich’s The Choirboys. She played a prostitute in one, hilarious scene with James Woods and Susan Batson; unfortunately, her Hollywood career was brief, and after appearing in 1982’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, she became addicted to heroin and died of hepatitis on October 25, 2002.
Forty-seven years old is still young for an exploitation actor. Many of the players in Massacre at Central High appear in recently filmed bonus features, including Kimberly Beck, better known for Marnie and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. This movie was given some kind of theatrical release by the Brian Distributing Corporation, and it was reviewed in major newspapers and on television. Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby, stalwart enemies of horror films, dug this one despite the violence and unrelenting negativity on display. Breaking habit, Ebert called Massacre at Central High “intelligent and uncompromising”—I wonder if he would say the same about 1973’s Schoolgirls in Chains—and Canby said it was “an original, fascinating work.” The movie has a lot in common with Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, and in 1976, America hadn’t yet caught onto the Italians and their sex comedies, and as far as high school movies went, it would take a few years for the deluge to begin. When Massacre at Central High came out, you’re really talking about American Graffiti and Cooley High, and movies popular in their day that have been forgotten over time: Summer of ’42, Buster and Billie, Up the Down Staircase (if that last one even counts).
What makes Massacre at Central High so compelling is its typical technical ineptitude mixed with Daalder’s Dutch sensibility. Early on, a bunch of guys are beating up a nerd for writing a swastika on someone’s locker. He gets a beating, and Daalder cuts to the same close-up of Beck just twice, before it’s revealed she’s way down the hallway, watching from afar. The dialogue sounds like it was translated from another language, or perhaps a first draft not punched up at all by a director who couldn’t write English—even Smith struggles, but she roars during her classroom assault, walking out onto the quad with both breasts peeking out of her ripped button down. There’s no one outside, and for a second it looks like Last Year at Marienbad.
The film presages school shootings, but even more so Heathers, with Maury running under the prom with dynamite without a Winona Ryder to chase him. He blows himself up at the end, but not before taking out some random bystanders who have nothing to do with the bizarre blood pact that gives cause for all of the murders in the movie. There are some great ones: electrocuted while hang-gliding, diving into an empty pool, exploding locker, car goes off a cliff. All of these stunts, particularly the exploding locker, are so impressive, the reason this movie exists, set pieces that keep building and building. The death of celluloid finds me searching the past for new treasure, garbage in its day. No doubt Massacre at Central High played at grindhouses where they never turned the lights on and there were layers of soda and gum and cum on the floors—but the negative is in great shape! You can see this film in high definition, the way no one ever expected you to see it. Rainbeaux Smith, giving it her all in an attempted rape scene, just six years left in her career. But she made so many more movies like this.
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