Overview: The Troma Team is proud to present the suspenseful, heart-stopping shocks and mystery of Graduation Day. It’s just weeks before high school graduation and members of the track team are being mysteriously and gruesomely murdered, one at a time.

When the team’s star runner drops dead at the end of a championship meet, her sister Anne (Patch MacKenzie) comes to town and a series of grisly murders begin. Is Anne responsible? Or is it coach Michaels (Christopher George) who has been fired because of Laura’s death?

Perhaps it’s the campus policeman who is disliked because of his over-zealous drug investigations? Or is it Laura’s boyfriend, Kevin (E. Danny Murphy), who can’t reconcile himself to Laura’s death? You won’t want to see Graduation Day alone!

Blu-ray Verdict: I’ll start by saying that I am a HUGE fan of the slasher movies of the early 1980s; flicks such as Friday The 13th, Final Exam and The House On Sorority Row hit the spot rather nicely.

Graduation Day was one of the first films in this category. Released in 1981, the plotline tells the story of a track-team star runner who drops down dead after a particularly taxing race. Despite the fact that no-one actually killed her (she fell victim to a blood clot), the blame for her death has rested with the track-team coach for the past six months ... it appears he worked her too hard.

The runner left behind a loving boyfriend, a loving sister, a loving mother and a hate-filled stepfather. All of these are reunited on Graduation Day, when the sister is invited to receive a special award on behalf of the deceased star. However, the day before graduation -- and literally minutes after the sister appears on campus -- one of the track team is brutally murdered in the college grounds.

Her body is not discovered immediately, and so the usual pre-graduation celebrations are taking place. But, in between these parties and rehearsals, more of the track team are dispatched in truly original style. Still the bodies remain unfound.

So who is this killer? Is it the sister, jealous of the team who survived her younger kin? Could it be the boyfriend, who only true love was taken when an artery burst in her left leg? Has the coach cracked up, after losing his job and being widely blamed for her death? Or is someone else hiding a terrible secret?

Graduation Day is a wonderful movie that is chock full of suspense, above average acting and some ingenious plot twists. Various sub-plots are added in an attempt to cloud your prediction of the killer’s identity and the ending comes as somewhat of a shock (it did to me, anyway!) When you consider that this is one of the first campus slashers, it is rather amazing.

Most movies have a few shortcomings, however, and GD is no different. I feel that too many false scares were implemented by the director (the first two or three are genuinely scary, but they get rather tiring after this) and about halfway through the film we get a five to ten minute drag period which you feel like fast-forwarding through. On the whole, though, these are certainly not major failings and do not impair the film overall.

In summary, I would recommend Graduation Day to anyone fond of whodunit slashers like Final Exam, Scream, I Know ... and Prom Night. Fans of flat-out gore will likely be disappointed as gore is de-emphasized in the movie, but this is all the better IMHO. And whilst GD isn’t going to win any Oscars, you could do a whole lot worse if you’re looking for a fun, scary and clever horror movie. [B.A.]

Bonus Features:
Classic introduction featuring Lloyd Kaufman
Interviews with Patch Mackenzie, Herb Freed, David Baughn, Martin Jay Sadoff, and Linnea Quigley
Commentaries featuring producer David Baughn and the hosts of The Hysteria Continues podcast
Coming distractions

Official Trailer

www.troma.com