As I was painfully reliving the experience of watching National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, I felt a strange sense of déjà vu. Not because I remembered seeing it back when I was a wee child of the ’80s, but because it kept reminding me of another movie that really sucked.
“Hey,” I heard myself shout in my brain when the connection was finally made, “this is just like Slaughter High!”
A quick overview of the plots of the two films makes this clear as both are about a group of assholes whose class reunion at their closed-down high school is interrupted by a disgruntled former student whose life was ruined via a tasteless class prank. Space prevents me from listing the other ways the two films coincide, but at a certain point, I stopped keeping count.
The main difference between them is that Class Reunion was marketed as a straight comedy, which it constantly (and depressingly) attempts to be, while Slaughter High was marketed as a straight horror film, despite the fact that a combination of the filmmaker’s incompetence and contempt for the audience makes it play far more like an unsuccessful spoof than a typical slasher movie.
Made by what can charitably be described as the then-Lampoon’s B-company, the John Hughes-penned Class Reunion helps prove my two long-held beliefs that there is nothing worse than a bad slasher movie parody and that there is no such thing as a good slasher movie parody. Still, this is better than any National Lampoon movie that’s been made in the last decade. —Allan Mott
Shelley Smith in this movie — uh, how to phrase this? — meow.
I must confess to being more of a Jacklyn Zeman man myself.
Just bought “National Lampoon’s Class Reunion” on DVD for $1.88 at Big Lots. Hadn’t seen it in at least 20 years, found it still enjoyable. Forgot Anne Ramsey (Throw Momma From the Train) was in it, also forgot Misty Rowe (a “Hee Haw Honey” was in it).