A lot of comedy movies in the late 70's and early 80's all seem to derive their humor from silly dialog and slapstick, probably modeled after the success of the Zucker brothers' early work. Student Bodies tries to cash in on this style of humor, but it often misses the mark. The moments that do work are really funny, but the jokes that fizzle out really bring the film down. The best part of the whole film is the opening sequence in which the film's villain, The Breather, stalks and kills a babysitter with a paperclip. The humor has a nice blend of visual gags, spot-on parody of the slasher genre, and some general silliness. The rest of the movie tends to alternate between the three of these types of humor, and it doesn't always work.
In typical slasher movie fashion, all the victims are introduced only to be killed moments later, sometimes literally only given a few moments. The murder weapons are over-the-top, including eggplants and homemade bookends. But for some reason, only the girls get axed with these silly weapons. All the male students are killed by being stuffed into garbage bags. This is never really treated as a joke, and so it's confusing as to whether this was meant to be funny or not. A nice subtle touch, and one of the only ones in the whole film, is that almost every adult in the film wears the same rubber gloves as the killer. It's both a nice nod to the popular slasher film plot device, and it gets to be quite amusing after a while.
However, for every funny joke that Student Bodies supplies, there's a stupid one to cancel it out. There's a strange repeated gag in which the killer continually steps in used bubblegum, which I can only assume is meant to be hilarious, or it wouldn't have been repeated. There are also a few jokes that start to beat the audience over the head. There's an on-screen body count after someone dies, and while it is amusing at first, it starts to get really annoying as the body count increases. There's also a gag that involves an on-screen message that says "Door Unlocked" whenever someone foolishly leaves their door unlocked so the killer can get in. Like all of the repeated gags in this film, the initial joke is funny, but the humor quickly wears off.
The other main annoyance I had when this film is the villain, The Breather. Like his namesake, The Breather has a canned breathing sound effect overlaying his various appearances. As I previously said, the joke is only funny for a moment, but then the humor wears right off. The same goes for The Breather's voice; he sounds like a really bad Vincent Price imitation. And what's stranger is that once the killer's identity is revealed, the culprit sounds nothing like The Breather.
The ending is very strange as well. Our main heroine kills The Breather, but suddenly all the previous murder victims appear out of nowhere and start to chase her. It's eventually revealed that this whole movie had been a dream. This is a very uninspired plot point, and it's certainly not making fun of any horror movie that had been out at the time. The last five minutes of the movie tries to cram in another twist ending, but it fails as well.
Overall, this a fairly decent parody film. It occasionally hits the mark, but for every good joke, there's an equally dumb one. A lot of the jokes are run into the ground by the end of the film, and the ending itself is very disappointing. All that besides, the funny moments really are funny, and if you can look past some of the stupid gags, this a pretty entertaining film. If you enjoy Airplane!-style humor, this worth looking into.
Entertainment- 4/5
Quality- 2/5
IMDB Page- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083133/
