Girls Nite Out (1984)

This movie is set on the campus of a small college that is on it’s way to the championship basketball game.  As part of the festivities the sororities are having a big scavenger hunt that takes them all over isolated parts of campus.  A killer takes advantage of this by stealing the team’s mascot costume and outfitting the bear’s claws with some real blades.  Between the girls running around campus and the killer’s ability to hide in plain sight the bodies start to pile up.  But who is the killer?  Is it the jilted and angry outsider?  Or maybe the friendly basketball player?  Perhaps the man who killed his ex-girlfriend years before has returned?  Like all good slasher movies this one has plenty of suspects.

So the real question is if this is a good slasher movie.  There are some things that I like about it and some things that I found annoying.  Lets start off with the good stuff.  For the most part I enjoyed the story and pacing of the movie.  It takes a while for the killings to get rolling, but I found that the movie was written so well that I was having a good time with the characters.  And the fact that I liked the characters made the last 1/3rd of the movie when the deaths started more fun.  I also loved the idea of the killer strolling around campus in the mascot costume.  This is one of the coolest ideas that I’ve seen for a slasher movie to hide the identity of the murderer and it doesn’t hurt that I’ve found the blank stare of these costumed weirdoes to be creepy.  Finally what I thought initially was going to be a glorified cameo by Hal Holbrook turned out to be an important part of the story.  He doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but what he does get is important. 

But there are some things that I didn’t like.  To begin with this is a slasher movie so I’m looking for 2 big things.  I expect some nudity (yeah I know it sounds creepy to actually say it), which is a staple of this type of movie.  Girls Nite Out has plenty of girls, but no skin!  There should also be some nice kills.  The movie has plenty of deaths, but they all pretty much the same.  Yeah sure that is more realistic, but who wants realism in a movie like this?  We just get one throat slashing after another and that gets kind of old after a while.  Another thing that bothered me was how the movie lets the audience in on the identity of the killer before they needed to.  Just in case you watch this movie and miss it I won’t spoil it for you.  What I will say is that the movie tries to be clever, but does it so badly that I think most fans are going to spot it right away.  It baffles me why they would make such a silly mistake in an otherwise solidly plotted movie. 

We have some good and some bad about Girls Nite Out.  In the end I still think that this movie is worth checking out.  But I’m a bummed that a movie that had a lot of potential ends up being average because of the issues I’ve mentioned. 

2 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2011 John Shatzer