Fun-in-the-sun threesome turned moment of final reckoning: excerpt from school horror film piece

Wednesday 9/2/26

I've been writing a lot. None of it's done. This is from a piece on back-to-school horror films.

***

David (Derrel Maury) is the new boy at Central High which his old pal Mark (Andrew Stevens) already attends. They were together somewhere else once where David helped Mark out. This is a reunion of friends and Mark wants to make David feel welcome, which at Central High takes the form of school being as easy as possible, with the cool kids able to do whatever they want to the less cool kids. Mark endeavors to bring David into the fold of his clique of the types of guys you suspect will later be rather date rape-y in college (if they get there), hangers on posing as head honchos, puffing out their chests, a veritable circle of suck.

But David is his own man. Mark knows his friend’s background like we, the audience, never do, but suffice it to say, being his own man has gotten him into trouble in the past, which could have meant the dishing out of some comeuppance at the mortal level, though in the name of justice. After all, there’s a vast difference between sitting atop one’s bed after a horrible day of tenth grade, cranking the Who’s Quadrophenia with the headphones on and wishing your tormentors would suffer, and systematically going around and bumping them off in admittedly ingenious fashion.

Agatha Christie would appreciate David. He’s a Robin Hood figure who doesn’t know when to stop. Or, one could counter, he knows exactly when to stop, and that’s when there’s no one left to punish. This is a strange, compelling film. Part And Then There Were None, A Clockwork Orange, Lord of the Flies, and Peanuts specials. Yes, you read that right, Peanuts specials, especially the early ones in which we don’t hear so much as the muted trombone of an adult’s voice. There are solely kids. It’s Lucy who fetches a shivering Linus from the pumpkin patch, not a parent who may as well have left him out there to be assaulted by a guy wearing a gourd on his head.

In Lord of the Flies there was the island, which in Massacre at Central High is the school. Realism and satire mix. This is a hard blend to get right, but the film does. David acts with kindness to those less fortunate. Which, in high school, means the bullied. The shunned. Mocked. He is a skilled listener and a natural born problem solver. Alas, this includes being an inventive ender of lives as well. Behold his creative means of dispatching. There’s a power failure, a diving board, and an unbeknownst emptied swimming pool. A detonated cliffside that comes crashing down on a fun-in-the-sun threesome. A rollercoaster ride of death in the back of a van for a student who looks as though he was otherwise destined to be Dauber on Coach. A hang-gliding barbecue. Technically a massacre is a single event rather than a series of slayings, but that wouldn’t have been as punchy, and perhaps the people responsible also went to a school without teachers.

Mark isn’t a horrible person. His loyalty to David is touching. Including when David goes skinny dipping with Mark’s girl (Kimberly Beck) who then tells him how much she desired David physically. Mark takes it in stride. He continues to be kind to this person who remains his girlfriend and his friend. Maturity? Or someone who can’t roll the boulder any further and has come to grips with being crushed by it?