See, this is exactly what you should do in case you want to make an 80's horror fanatic very angry. You just give the false impression that he/she is about to watch a movie with plentiful of zombies and then subsequently you serve a movie that features absolutely
NO zombies! The friend who borrowed me his VHS-copy luckily warned me beforehand about the complete lack of zombies, but I can easily imagine that back in the eighties a lot of initially enthusiast zombie buffs were severely disappointed. It's actually a big shame because misleading titles and disappointed genre fans lead to negative ratings, even though "Zombie High" really isn't that much of a bad film. It's a fairly spirited and harmless little 80's horror-comedy that only features derivative story elements instead of horror or comedy, but at least it's never boring AND it stars two of my personal favorite B-movie actresses; Virginia Madsen and Sherilyn Fenn. Madsen, playing an 18-year-old student at age 26, is very happy when she gets selected as one of the first girls ever to attend classes in a prominent boarding school that previously was accessible for boys only. Her enthusiasm gradually turns into fear as she notices that her fellow students start losing their personalities, like they are being lobotomized or something. Andrea has a bit of a crush on her handsome biology teacher Mr Philo, but can anyone in this entire perilous school be trusted? In the subject line of this user comment I raised the question of where this titular school could be located. Deriving from the brief plot description, I think experienced thriller fans know exactly the school is located. Rebellious and headstrong teenagers transforming overnight into exemplar students? Doesn't it ring a bell? Could this school possibly be a little side- project of the chauvinist males of Stanford? The concept of "Zombie High" is a mixture between the 70's classic "The Stepford Wives" and the plot of a horror novel by John Saul which I believe was called "Darkness". Eventually it turns out that the teachers are over a century old and extract fluid from the student brains in order to stay young and virile. Apparently extracting brain fluids turns people into model citizens! I sure hope the government doesn't find out about that! Anyway, after a pretty dull and uneventful first hour, the denouement sequences are amusing and contain a handful of decent special effects. Director Rob Link attempts to maintain an atmosphere of mystery surrounding the school's dark secrets, but it's too predictable and commonly known.
Review of Zombie High
