Cemetery High (Gorman Bechard, 1988)

A semi-feminist meta horror/comedy about movies, Cemetery High is an unusual ultra-low budget b-movie that turns many of its limitations into strengths, though not everything lands and some of the jokes are sub-sitcom-level. The sound is pretty bad, too, with the dialogue occasionally obscured by the much louder background noise. Still, it's got a lot of charm, and I enjoyed it more than I didn't.

Movies that are commentaries about themselves and the medium of film usually create a distance between audience and character, and that's also true of Cemetery High, though the comedic tone treats the viewer as co-conspirator. These movies also tend to come in hot and fizzle out quickly. Cemetery High avoids this second-half slog by maintaining a fast pace and moving on to another scene after making its point. There's not much padding here. It's like a film version of a Ramones song.

Cemetery High begins in the last week of the school year. A trio of twentysomething teenage women, Kate (Debi Thibeault); Kathy (Karen Nielsen); and Michelle (Lisa Schmidt), have been sexually assaulted by three members of the football team. These rapist jocks have been terrorizing the girls at the high school for years (they keep flunking and returning to school; apparently, there is no academic probation for athletes at this institution of secondary education), and our heroes decide to do something about it. On graduation day, they kill the creeps with knives and axes. The women decide to continue their vigilante spree full-time, trading their messier weapons for guns and adding a fourth (and later, a fifth) member to what is eventually dubbed the Scumbusters by local media (Dianne, played by Simone Reyes, and Lisa, played by Ruth Collins).

No man in the Waterbury, Connecticut metro area is safe, particularly rapists, harassers, pedophiles, and guys who relentlessly hit on women in bars. (Nearly every man in the film is a fake Guido stereotype, a fake redneck, or a fake biker.) The murder spree turns the women into folk heroes and the city into a relatively crime-free zone (except for the vigilante murders, of course), but also makes them the target of unhinged sexist Jesus freak Mayor Goodman (Tony Kruk). The group's only male allies are Bob (David Coughlin), the local sheriff, who is too dumb to be a threat, and the gay coroner, Dr. Schiavone (Frank Stewart).

The movie routinely breaks the fourth wall. Footage of a cheap gong being struck plays whenever a violent scene is about to happen and a pair of bicycle horns being honked precedes the nude scenes. An on-screen narrator is murdered by the women mid-interview, and the characters refer to themselves as being in a movie and talk about what needs to happen in later scenes to satisfy genre and storytelling requirements. One scene takes place in a video store, with the characters perusing a VHS copy of director Bechard's previous film. The movie even breaks away for a commercial about the Rock Jock, a bulletproof jock strap that will protect men's crotches from the vigilantes' bullets.

These meta moments are alternately clever, stupid, clever-stupid, obvious, and/or annoying, with about a 50/50 chance of landing on a decent joke, but they give the film a flavor lacking in run-of-the-mill revenge-based b-movies. Cemetery High's messaging about sexism and rape culture in both the movies and women's everyday lives is sometimes obvious, sometimes heavy-handed, but welcome in a 1980s b-movie, and it manages to do all this while staying light and fun and avoiding grimness. Not all of it works, but the moments that do are pretty enjoyable. Bechard is not a big fan of the movie, however. The production company took control of the project, and it was edited (and a few scenes were shot) without his input, much to his chagrin. 

Bechard's had an interesting career. His early work includes genre films Disconnected, Psychos in Love, and Galactic Gigolo. He then turned to indie drama and romantic comedy with You Are Alone, Friends (With Benefits), The Kiss, and Broken Side of Time, but he's probably best known for his music documentaries and concert films about The Replacements, Archers of Loaf, Grant Hart, Lydia Loveless, and Sarah Shook. His other documentary subjects have included the bond between an elderly man and the abused dog he rescued, senior dogs, the three oldest pizzerias in New Haven, and people from various walks of life answering the same 20 questions.