Absolutely Brilliant!

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

By 1981, all manner of slasher had been slashed. From dates on the calendar to holidays to high school, college, probably every trade schools, if you could kill someone someplace on some special day, there was a great chance that cinemas, drive-in and video stores had documented evidence of the murders. But a track team getting offed? What a twist!At one of their track meets, star runner Laura Ramstead collapses at the finish line, pushed too hard by her coach and dying of exhaustion. Soon, her sister Anne is on leave from the Navy, back home with the mother and stepfather she desperately wanted to leave behind.Meanwhile, a killer is wiping out the track team one by one, complete with giallo-like black gloves and a stopwatch. With each kill, he or she uses bright lipstick to cross another member off of the team's photo. If Anne has gloves just like the killer, is it all a coincidence? Hmm?There are all manner of people of interest, from Kevin, Laura's boyfriend, to Dolores (Linnea Quigley!) the team's bad girl and Principal Gugilone (Michael Pataki, who is in almost every movie that we watch), who has a stopwatch and plenty of knives in his desk drawer. And oh yeah, Coach Michaels (Christopher George, Gates of Hell/City of the Living Dead, Day of the Animals, Mortuary, Pieces, pretty much every movie that I watch that doesn't have Michael Pataki in it, so this is a rare crossover), who isn't allowed to coach any longer, despite the fact that it was a blood clot that really killed Laura.Hey look! There's Vanna White as a school bully! And more dead bodies! Soon, Kevin and Coach Michaels get into a huge argument over who the killer is, but the cops get there and shoot the wrong guy. Yep, it's Kevin and he has Laura's corpse all made up in her graduation cap and gown. He also has a sweet Vampirella poster on his wall.A fight ensues and Anne ends up pushing Kevin into spikes - but not before body after body is revealed. That night, he comes back to kill her - an undead version of him at least - but it's all a dream. It's just her asshole stepfather, which makes it even easier to leave the town behind forever.I ended up liking this one way more than I thought that I would. It has some elements of style, plenty of gore and lots of ridiculous moments, like a bed of spikes killing a high jumper. Plus, there's a heavy metal concert with the band Felony, a roller disco scene and a combination football/knife murder weapon. Truly, something for every member of the family to enjoy.

Let's face it, GRADUATION DAY was never going to win any film-making awards. It's a low budget slice of sleazy trash, rushed out on the cheap to cater for the audience's new-found appetite for horror in the wake of HALLOWEEN and Friday THE 13TH. The plot is threadbare, the editing is slightly dodgy, and most of the cast give performances so wooden that you'd think you were down the local forest.And yet, and yet...GRADUATION DAY has a certain charm all of its own. The high school setting is a fun one, and the various HALLOWEEN-inspired stalk 'n' slash sequences are a hoot. The cheesy gore effects are equally great fun, and then there's the presence of the hammily entertaining Christopher George (THE EXTERMINATOR) as the coach, George Michaels (yes, really). A dodgy musical interlude goes on FOREVER, and of course it wouldn't be a slasher film without the twist endings.Director Herb Freed seems intent on making his film as sleazy as possible given the constraints of the day; his camera lovingly lingers on his actresses (including a young Linnea Quigley) as they strip off and inevitably find themselves murdered soon afterwards. Playing "guess the killer" is part of the fun. It might be cheap, shoddy and occasionally distasteful, but is GRADUATION DAY fun? The answer is a resounding yes!

Graduation Day is a film about murder, revenge and eighties cheese. A young girl running track and field tragically dies from a heart attack. Her coach was pushing her to hurry up and make the finish line when it happened. Months later it's graduation time, and all of the students are preparing for the big day. The sister of the girl who died shows up, and the moment she does, the members of Laura's track and field team begin being murdered in horrific ways. IS the killer Laura's sister Anne, the intense track and field coach, or someone else entirely?I had mixed feelings about 'Graduation Day'. It was effective in many ways. The story was pretty good, and I liked the character development of the sister Anne. I also thought that having the killer cross off each victim by marking an 'X' on their faces on the track and field team's picture was a nice touch. But the story loses focus after the thirty minute mark, and Graduation Day becomes a jumbled mess. I honestly didn't know who half the people were that were getting killed, the film didn't seem to care enough to introduce the students to us. There were some tense moments when the killer chases the victims through the woods, but that's about it. The acting wasn't anything too great, but it wasn't atrocious. The ending was strange, I'm not a huge fan of the killer's identity but it had a bit of a cool twist. I'd recommend 'Graduation Day' to horror fans/completests and that's about it. It isn't one of the better slashers of the eighties, but definitely worth a watch.5/10

I can't really say I just saw a good film here. As a slasher, it does sort of deliver the goods. In this case, that's a handful of typical & mildly enjoyable kills, a little bit of gore left & right, and Linea Quigley running around exposing her breasts. Not once, but twice. It's about the members of a high school sporting team getting offed one by one. Who on earth could be such a maniac and why is he or she doing this? Honestly, the plot doesn't do a very good job in trying to hide the identity of the killer, but the poor red herrings are quite amusing. "Graduation Day" turns out a bare bones teen slasher -- featuring a very lousy musical sequence with a very lousy band playing & also quite a bit of entertaining experimental cross-cutting -- that might still be worth it for fans of the same old slashing formula. I didn't mind watching it myself. Main highlights for me were a sword-through-the-throat kill and the clichéd 'Psycho-esque' climax at the end.