No joy is taken in panning a filmmaker’s directorial debut, particularly when it’s a slasher film (this writer’s soft spot) or slasher-adjacent. With “Student Body,” that’s actually one of the biggest problems: it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It is a teen slasher pic, but only incidentally in that it seems bashful to even be one. Writer-director Lee Ann Kurr’s debut has a green energy to it, and yet, that doesn’t change much when the pacing and focus feel adrift.
At the prestigious Allendale High School, good-girl Jane Shipley (an earnest Montse Hernandez) is an embarrassment to her childhood friend, entitled trust-fund princess Merritt Sinclair (Cheyenne Haynes). The only smart one in class to apply herself and practically ace a calculus test, Jane is chosen to solve a problem on the chalkboard by math teacher Mr. Aunspach (Christian Camargo), canceling all chances for a class retake. Merritt and her close-knit clique—soccer player Nadia (Harley Quinn Smith), goofball Eric (Austin Zajur), and photographer Ellis (Anthony Keyvan)—won’t stand for it when their respective futures depend on it. After Merritt convinces Jane to accuse Teach of harassment, they walk into the school after hours and raid the gym teacher’s whiskey cabinet. Secrets may come out, or they might not, but a psychopath in the high school’s Anvil mascot costume certainly shows up, and he’s got a sledgehammer.
"Student Body" does deserve credit for trying to thread inappropriate student-teacher dynamics and teenage social pressures into a high school-set slasher setting. It's just unsuccessful with a full plate. Director Lee Ann Kurr does, however, transcend her small budget with a slick look and some atmosphere in the school's red-hued photography darkroom. Her five main actors also bring enough personality to their underwritten roles, particularly Cheyenne Haynes and Harley Quinn Smith whose enthusiastically bitchy one-liners roll off the tongue like second nature. But the one-location script is too small for the poorly drawn characters to truly break out or actually matter. None of them are entirely worth latching onto or easy to connect with, not even the frenemy relationship between Jane and Merritt. Once the slashing finally commences at the halfway mark, it's actually a relief to see some of them getting what they deserve. And, although everybody would want to kill these kids, the whodunit mystery is rarely ever in doubt.
“Suck my tits! If we find an open door, I’m taking it and driving the hell out of here. I’m not revenging or waiting for anyone!” Like the delivery of that snappy, self-aware line, “Student Body” is at least spirited, but even that type of hip, snarky Diablo Cody-level teen-speak, while occasionally amusing, never seems to fully click with the rest of the film's tone. Sedate compared to Joseph Kahn's Red Bull-fueled, kitchen-sink concoction "Detention" but still wanting to be glib and clever, this colorful teen-slasher muddle feels too hesitant to be fun and too confused at what it wants to actually achieve.
Grade: C -
1091 Pictures is releasing “Student Body” (89 min.) to video on demand on February 8, 2022.
source http://kibsreviews.blogspot.com/2022/02/student-body-spirited-but-confused.html