Ghoul School (1990)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Absolutely Fantastic

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

GHOUL SCHOOL is a really cheesy shot-on-video high school horror film made in 1990. The story, which is slightly similar to RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, involves a couple of high school students being infected by the school's water supply and turning into flesh-munching ghouls. The infection quickly spreads through the school and a bunch of survivors have to try to escape the menace.The acting is lamentably bad and the script not much better, having obviously been written in a hurry and off the cuff. The emphasis of GHOUL SCHOOL is very much on special effects, with regular gore scenes showing bodies being torn asunder by the ghouls. They're hardly realistic-looking - plastic pipes are used for guts in one moment - but at least this is slightly better than some of the productions released under the Troma banner.

Totally incoherent and utterly retarded piece of campy splatter horror garbage which makes the entire Troma repertoire – including their biggest embarrassments like "Class of Nuke 'Em High 2" and "Surf Nazis Must Die" – look like genuine cinematic masterpieces. Actually, since this high level of amateurishness can usually only be found in a Troma production, I initially assumed it was one of Lloyd Kaufman's films. Apparently it can even get worse, since "Camp Motion Pictures" specializes in releasing exclusively the worst Z-grade horror experiments, like "Splatter Farm", "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers", "Video Violence", "Cannibal Campout" and – of course – this demented camp treasure entitled "Ghoul School". Two sniveling high school dropouts plot to rob the school janitor (why? I haven't got a clue) and accidentally cause a toxic chemical to get mixed with the school's water supply. The swimming team are the first ones to turn into green-faced flesh-eating zombies, and they promptly go after the rest of the present school populous, namely a duo of horror movie nerds, the members of a metal band and the world's worst basketball team. You'd think there will be at least some extreme gore and splatter to enjoy here, but no. "Ghoul School" is actually very boring with only a couple of messy disembowelment sequences to satisfy the gorehounds among us. The rest of the script (if you can call it that) features intentional jokes that aren't the least bit funny and more serious parts that are unintentionally hilarious. All the best scenes involve the members of the basketball team or their coach. Not a single player manages to score a point and their coach is unquestionably the teacher with the least authority ever. The acting performances are atrocious, or what else did you expect, and despite of the short running time there's still a lot of filler – like, for example, Jackie the Joke Man's terribly unfunny monologue.

This uproariously atrocious piece of cheerfully cheap'n'chintzy low-budget horror splatter schlock has to be one of the funniest things I've had the pleasure to watch in quite some time. Granted, most of the humor is strictly of the unintentional kind, but it's still often sidesplitting just the same. A toxic chemical gets into the water supply at a New Jersey high school. A bunch of folks are transformed into fanged, growling, blue-skinned flesh-eating zombies who go on the rampage. Trapped inside the school with the ghouls are two irritating horror movie fanboy geeks and a severely talent-challenged wailing, roaring, head-banging heavy metal hair band. Boy, does this delightfully dreadful doozy possess all the right-so-utterly-wrong-they're-paradoxically-right schlock flick stuff to measure up as a real four-star gut-busting stinker: sloppy direction, a crude wafer-thin script, obnoxious foul-mouthed dialogue (the ridiculously excessive overuse of the almighty "f" bomb is downright mind-numbing), terrible acting, a tacky hum'n'shiver synthesizer score, cruddy make-up f/x, a hopelessly dated groovy-bumping rock soundtrack, laughably hokey rinky-dink over-the-top gross-out gore, and a horrendous abrupt ending. Poor Richard Bright (Al Neri in the "Godfather" features!) pops up as the jerky principal. Befuddled talk show host Joe Franklin and annoying comedian Jackie "the Joke Man" Martling briefly appear as themselves in an especially awful drawn-out sequence (Martling tells Franklin some of the worst, most groan-inducing and painfully unfunny jokes you never want to hear). Favorite line: "This is one very *beep*ed-up nightmare." Filmed in Wayne, New Jersey, where stuff like this happens all the time. A shamefully unsung should-be camp crap classic.

A high-school swim team is turned into zombies after a chemical leaks into the water supply right before a school sponsored rock concert. It's up to some nerds to stop them. Horrible dialog, a nonsense plot, beyond crappy editing, combine to make a supremely unwatchable horror/comedy. When Jackie the Joke Man is far and away the best 'actor' in this, you KNOW you've entered the ninth circle of Hell. What the hell can I say good about the piece of cap? Ummm... hold on I'm thinking. Well the lighting is OK in parts, I guess.My Grade: F DVD Extras: Commentary with Timothy O'Rawe, Second commentary with Micheal Raso; 6 minutes of chlorine jokes by Jackie Marline; Makeup FX segment; 3 short films by O'Rawe; Promo Reel with optional commentary; 2 theatrical trailers (one for 1990 and one for 2004); Trailers for "the Feral Man", "the Bonesetter", "Demon Summer", and "Midnight Skater"