Up until recently I had never heard of this movie and being a big fan of Slasher movies, especially when they became popular again during the late 90's, this one totally passed me by and don't recall seeing it on the shelves of my local video shop. So when I seek ed this out and looking at the cover with the killer wearing a creepy red mask and an awesome looking clown outfit, so naturally I was intrigued by this and when I got round to seeing it. Well I can see why this got lost amongst the shuffle.
The story follows a group of friends spending graduation night setting up pranks for their teachers at the school after hours and soon enough a killer shows up with a massive pair of scissors shows up and starts picking them off one by one.
This movie wasn't all bad, it does offer some great creepy locations with the school itself with a room full of creepy mannequins as well as a room of stuffed animals, which with the dark lighting does create an eerie atmosphere and the long dark corridors are used really well with a really cool Gothic look to them which does make for some really tense moments. The killer was very creepy and made for a real threat. The twists and turns that involve the killer or the last act which really took me by surprise and it really do keep you guessing up until the last act.
But there are several things that let things down in this movie, firstly the tame and lifeless acting, I don't know whether that was down to the bad dubbing and the pace was really sluggish and the dialogue was just stilted and awful. There were three distinct acts to this and the first act was really boring and dragged out and struggled to adapt to the tone. It's not until the killer appears is when things get interesting.
All in all 'School's Out' was average with some definite things that works in its favour including the mystery aspect, but gets bogged down by the pace and boring characters and if these things were tweaked a little, then this could have made for a much better movie.