Class Reunion Massacre (aka The Redeemer: Son of Satan!) (1978)

So follow me very closely here because this plot is a mess.  The movie starts with a creepy kid strolling out of a lake and catching a bus so he can sing in the choir at church.  The minister is preaching fire and brimstone, and then the plot suddenly shifts.  A man arrives at a school and kills the custodian so he can take his place.  Then we go thru a long stretch of the movie where 6 characters that went to high school are introduced, each with an annoying and boring background.  They all arrive at the school where the man posing as the custodian locks them in and picks them off one at a time.  After killing them all off (oops spoiler) the movie then shifts back to the sermon where we are let in that the minister was the killer and the creepy kid takes the bus back to the lake.  Yeah really that is the plot, I’m not kidding.

This movie has the double whammy of a plot that makes no sense and being so boring I wanted to smash my head on the wall to stay awake.  First of all it is readily apparent to me that they obviously either added the bit with the minister to stretch the runtime out or have no idea about story structure and narrative.  I say this because the wrap around just doesn’t fit the rest of the movie in anyway at all.  You have some crappy pseudo religious thing with I guess the devil wrapped around a terrible slasher movie.  In fact I only mention the devil thing because of the movie’s other title and not because of anything from the movie itself.  The part of the movie with the actual class reunion is one of the worst attempts at a slasher movie that I’ve ever seen, which considering some of the crap I’ve sat thru is saying a lot.  We are 42 minutes into the movie before we see the 2nd kill which is the kiss of death for a slasher movie.  The worst is even when the kills start the movie is still not at all interesting.  The performances range from awful to really awful.  This is the only credit for both the director and most of his cast.  Thank God for that. 

Special effects here are very basic.  We do get a nice wound with some maggots and a crispy ex-football player.  Beyond that there isn’t much here to talk about.  The kills are boring and mostly off screen, so no memorable gore effects.  We get a couple of gunshots, a knife to the head, a woman drowned in a sink, and the lamest trap I’ve ever seen!  Really the effects are just as disappointing as the rest of the movie.

Honestly this has got to be one of the lamest and most boring movies that I’ve ever seen.  Terrible story mixes with lousy acting and even worse filmmaking to create a truly awful movie.  Class Reunion Massacre has yet to see a DVD release and is only available on an out of print VHS.  This movie just goes to prove that there are reasons why some of these haven’t seen a DVD release and really shouldn’t.  Don’t spend your money on or waste your time watching this turkey.

0 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2009 John Shatzer