A slasher film set at a high school, Graduation Day is remembered most for its appearance of Vanna White, merely a couple of years away from achieving immense fame turning letters on TV’s Wheel of Fortune. Directed by Herb Freed (Beyond Evil), Graduation Day is so utterly forgettable that although I’ve seen it probably three times in my life, I never can recall who the killer is. Then again, the experience is so passive, why pay it mind?

The movie begins with a montage of parallel bars and other athletic pursuits set to an inspirational disco track that concludes with a senior track star’s death at the finish line by a loosed blood clot. Her Navy-enlisted sister (Patch Mackenzie, It’s Alive III) comes home from being stationed in Guam to attend the funeral and graduation ceremony, and almost immediately, other members of the track and field team are murdered one by one by a killer wielding a fencing sword. He/she wears the requisite black gloves, but utilizing a stopwatch while stalking his/her victims has to be a slasher first.

Each unfortunate senior is marked off a group photo with lipstick, after being, say, stabbed through the throat in the locker room or pole-vaulting onto a bed of spikes, because that can happen. A second before one guy loses his head, his make-out partner says, “It must be nice to be a boy, piss anywhere you want to.” The body count is surprisingly low; the pacing, predictably slow.

At least Vanna plays a bitch who pees her pants in fright. Another famous face/figure in an early role is scream queen Linnea Quigley (The Return of the Living Dead), who sheds her shirt in an attempt to seduce her Marvin Hamlisch-esque music teacher into raising her grade, yet even that fails to raise a viewer’s pulse. Freed’s ineptness is reflected in day-for-night shots, strobe effects, and allowing both coach Christopher George (Pieces) and principal Michael Pataki (Dracula’s Dog) to emote through squints and grunts. —Rod Lott

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Keep your expectations low to the ground when slithering your way into Calamity of Snakes. This is, after all, a Hong Kong film whose opening credits include such crew positions as “lighiting” and “propesman.” However, Bruceploitation-vet director and co-writer Chi Chang makes up for any spelling errors with serpents, and lots of ’em.

Our hero is an architect who’s designed a 17-floor luxury apartment building, yet refuses to cut corners in interest of time, thereby vexing his greedy boss. At the construction site, a bed of snakes is unearthed, and rather than let professionals deal with it, the boss orders them killed, doing much damage himself with a bulldozer. Chang used real, live snakes throughout the movie, including their grisly, goopy murders here by shovels; soon after, we see a street vendor strip a live cobra to squeeze “juice” out of its bladder to concoct a refreshing beverage of sexual vitality.

Once the building is complete, the snakes — Survivors? Children? It’s never explained, nor needs to be — exact their revenge, first attacking a couple mid-coitus. After infiltrating the workers’ barracks, mongooses (again, real) are unleashed to clean house, in a long sequence that’s like Rudyard Kipling’s “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” come to life. When a big ol’ boa constrictor is suspected, a snake expert is hired, resulting in an amazing fight sequence in an empty cardboard box factory between the old man and the huge boa, which can fling itself across the room.

By the time of the grand-opening shindig, Calamity of Snakes plays like an Irwin Allen disaster epic … if that Towering Inferno producer had the forethought to include slow-motion footage of a guy slinging a sword at all the herps being flung his way. They burst into the parking garage, drop in on a mahjong game, and slink into a child’s bed and a woman’s bath. Some of the slithering beasts growl when in attack mode; others come equipped with kung-fu stock sound effects; all contribute to one mad Mother Nature flick. —Rod Lott

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If you don’t count Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys, which was made outside of Full Moon’s purview, Charles Band’s mad-marionette saga finally hits its 10th
chapter with the World War II-set Puppet Master X: Axis Rising. Whether anyone besides Band cared or was keeping track is beside the point. If you’ve seen any of them, you know exactly what you’re in for: a low-budget exercise that, like a bowel movement, can be slightly pleasurable if you let it.

In this installment, the drill-headed puppet Tunneler falls into the hands of monocled Nazi Commandant Moebius (Scott Anthony King). The current owner of the other killer puppets is bum-legged wannabe soldier Danny Coogan (played dopily by newcomer Kip Canyon, barely able to keep his mouth closed), who vows not only to get him back, but to “get those grimy Krauts.” But first, he and his girlfriend (Jean Louise O’Sullivan, Full Moon’s The Dead Want Women) must convince the U.S. Army that the Nazis and Japanese have infiltrated the streets of Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, in a secret Chinatown lab, Moebius keeps Austrian Dr. Freuhoffer (Oto Brezina of the utterly wretched Nude Nuns with Big Guns) working on a “resurrection device” that would bring the dead back to life … if it worked correctly. What the doc does do correctly is build four new puppets: Bombshell, Blitzkrieg, Weremacht and Kamikaze, the latter being a Japanese character with stereotypical buck teeth and diagonal lines for eyes.

The whole point of Axis Rising is to get those new puppets to fight the old puppets of Blade, Pinhead, Jester, Leech Woman and Six Shooter, and that belatedly happens after Band takes his typical route of slow-story padding. Due to budgetary reasons, the puppets are controlled by rods and wires instead of being rendered in stop-motion animation as some of them were at the series’ start. The most impressively sculpted character is one of the humans: the appropriately named Uschi (Stephanie Sanditz), a bra-busting Nazi. —Rod Lott

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Made for TV, the New York-set The Rats originally was slated to air the week of Sept. 11, 2001, until suddenly, broadcasting a Big-Apple-in-peril flick didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. But aside from a prologue in which the titular creatures short out the electricity in Lady Liberty, there’s nothing all that NYC-centric about it. If it can be set there, it can be set anywhere.

Thousands of aggressive lab rats have decided to fight back against humans, beginning in a posh downtown department store overseen by Twin Peaks’ Mädchen Amick, who is aging well. She calls in exterminator Vincent Spano (Rumble Fish), who is not.

Although it does throw in some rat gore and an attack on kids in a public swimming pool, The Rats runs through the numbers: Disbelieving city officials? Check. Opposite leads who eventually find love through a time of crisis? Check. Minor black supporting character dies? Check. Come up with a cliché, and sooner or later, The Rats gets to it, right down to the ever-predictable it-ain’t-really-over final shot. Child’s Play 2 and Man’s Best Friend director John Lafia does a decent job, having experience with all sorts of beasts, like killer dolls, robot dogs and Ally Sheedy. —Rod Lott

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Early into Wrong Turn 5 — the opening credits, to be exact — a great visual joke is delivered: The first two words of the title plop onscreen over a shot of leaf-covered forest grounds, but the numeral portion is represented by an open hand freshly chopped from the arm of a female jogger. If only writer/director Declan O’Brien (who also helmed the previous year’s Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings) had displayed more of that wit.

Instead, he settles right in to a rote tale of five college kids you won’t care about, much less be able to tell apart — until they’re torn apart, in which case knowing who’s who is made all the easier. They’re camping out at a West Virginia town hosting the annual Mountain Man Festival, a music fest that rivals Coachella, according to the TV news reporter on assignment in the small town’s obvious backlot set. Of course, they’ll never get there.

Wrong Turn 5 assumes you’ve seen every entry of the franchise — all but the 2003 original made expressly for home video — so it need not introduce you to its trio of inbred, mutilated hillbillies who feast on their human victims: Saw-Tooth, One-Eye and Three-Finger, so named for their individual deformities. (Cleft Palate, it appears, was too much of a line-crosser.) Well, I have seen the entire series, and just a smidge of catch-up each time would be appreciated. This installment throws a Pinhead into the mix: Hellraiser icon Doug Bradley, as the killers’ normal-looking father figure.

One can’t complain too much about its economy; this is, after all, a franchise that exists solely to showcase gruesome deaths. In that department, this fifth go-round offers two gloriously gory demises. The best involves one tow truck, two legs and three sledgehammers; the other, a guy buried up to his neck in a soccer field, and a big ol’ piece of farm equipment bearing rotating blades. O’Brien scores by choosing practical effects over computer-generated ones. —Rod Lott

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