Move Your Ass: It's Graduation Day

 Note: This review first appeared in Drive-In Asylum's 1981 Yearbook Special in 2023. It is now sold out, but the zine is currently working on a 1980 Yearbook Special, and I wrote a review of Battle Beyond the Stars for it. Look for it soon!

Despite being thoroughly trashed by critics in 1981, the Herb Freed-directed Graduation Day is a mostly appealing -- and often funny -- slasher enlivened by a cool cast, quirkiness, and sleaze. 

The adults are all self-absorbed and clueless and are either dismissing, ignoring, scolding, harassing, or banging the students. This is all filtered through the busyness/craziness of a high school graduation week but also one that is in the aftermath of a student-athlete’s death on the track field. 

Principal Guglione (Michael Pataki) actively despises the students and tells his secretary Blondie (E.J. Peaker), with whom he’s having an affair, to come in his office quickly – “like a bunny.” Pataki and Peaker are hilarious as an office/sex duo who fight over having to deal with those damn, worried parents who want to know why their kids haven’t come home yet from last night.

Coach George Michaels (Christopher George) is an intense, black-haired SOB track/gymnastics coach who says things like “move your little ass, Sally” to students and sees himself as a misunderstood, Great Molder of Young People, shitcanned because of a blood clot.

 Anne Ramstead (Patch Mackenzie), on leave from the Navy, comes to town after her younger sister’s death and is met with disdain by certain portions of the local population who call her a “lesbo,” “bitch,” and “weird” – all within the first 20 minutes of the movie. Mackenize is quite effective as a tough, tormented sibling who wants answers and isn’t afraid to use a little Kung Fu -- or squeeze the balls of taxpayers/sexual predators -- in the process. 

The movie’s title sequence almost seems like a TV drama or Afterschool Special with footage of a high school track event, propelled by a sports-appropriate disco song, a crowd that can’t get enough track, and athletes in action, on the track and off. But it ends with the victory of Laura Ramstead (the late Ruth Ann Llorens) in the 200-meter race – and her subsequent collapse and death.

After that opening, we see members of the track team being picked off, one by one, in various bizarre and bloody ways by an unseen, black-gloved killer, followed by a close-up of their stopwatch.

We come to know various students like Doris (holy shit, that is Vanna White), and Laura’s boyfriend, Kevin (E. Danny Murray), whose home can best be described as an art assault; and also friendly Dolores (Linnea Quigley), who romances her boyfriend by telling him, “I am going to nail your ass tonight,” and passes music class by the skin of her, er, by her naked skin. We also meet music teacher/playboy Mr. Roberts (Richard Balin) who after introducing his “snake” to an underage student and is pranked, knows who the real “scumbag” is.

One of Freed’s most exciting scenes takes place at an outside roller rink, conveniently adjacent to the wooded area near the school where some murders have already taken place, while a glam band, Felony, rocks out and a delirious layer of lights swirls.

On the trail of the killer, incapably, are Officer MacGregor (Virgil Frye), who keeps a joint in his gun and can’t find his badge, and Detective Halliday (Carmen Argenziano), who describes the students as “about to fly out of their nest and shit on the rest of us.”

Graduation Day was scripted by Freed and his wife Anna Marisse, who died in 1984, from a story by co-producer David Baughn, who previously worked with Freed on 1976’s Haunts and 1980’s Beyond Evil, and earlier had been a sales agent for Russ Meyer.

Notably, Freed points out in an accompanying interview on Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-Ray that he “never came close to horror again” and indicates it was due to a “self-reckoning” over the violence depicted in the movie and the “contamination” of the slasher scene.