Hell High was released to no acclaim close to the end of the slasher era. By 1989, it seemed that 4 out of 5 horror movies were low budget shockers that had a deep debt to the formula set by John Carpenter’s Halloween. Hell High is no exception, featuring a psychotic person systematically killing a bunch of teenagers.

In the required childhood opening scene, Brooke Storm faced a fatal origin story. As a young pink party-dressed girl, Brooke accidentally murdered a pair of high school students who had the nerve to rip the head off her dolly. 18 years later, Brooke is a teacher for the worst high school students ever, including a group of outcasts who are so evil they drink Jack Daniels on high school property before driving off at the end of the day. After being tormented, Brooke turns into the systematic killer that slowly slaughters the students one by one.

The original DVD featured two commentaries. The first is by director Douglas Grossman, who spoke to the movie’s production including some behind the scenes dirt. He tells us the story behind the movie’s body doubles, and why the actresses had stunt boobies. He also drops major production tidbits, informing us that one particularly weird scene where a teenage girl shows her boyfriend how to molest the drugged Brooke Storm was included because it fulfilled the requirement to have one lesbian scene.

But, the shining star of the DVD is a commentary by Joe Bob Briggs, who takes the 80 minutes of run time to explain how each scene is important and both upholds and subverts the cliches. The group of kids are anti-establishment outcasts instead of popular kids, but is still made up of The Jock, The Brat, The Slut, and The Fat Guy. Briggs points out, at every chance, the slasher rule that nobody is dead until their body is penetrated. The killer is a woman this time, a relative rarity in the 1980s. And, the outcasts go seeking trouble instead of the trouble coming to them. They aren’t morally superior characters who happen to fall into the path of a killer (who may or may not have been wronged by a group of unrelated people in the past).

The one thing Briggs misses is that this is a hinging of the slasher film to the rape-revenge genre, where a violated woman turns into a justified killer. This genre mashing combines two conflicting sets of cliches and actually points out the deficiencies of the other. It’s almost like a senior thesis, but with some hilariously terrible dialogue (a “helpful” neighbor sees the panicked Brooke, and forces her to down a pill stating “It’s just a quaalude. All the kids are taking them.”). Though he misses that important juncture, Briggs gets why the movie works, why it’s silly in some places, and why its terrible in others. The commentary is alternately hilarious (“You can’t introduce an upper respiratory problem in the third reel. Eugene O’Neill said that”), touching (he puts in a lot of sympathy for the lead asshole Christopher Stryker who died of AIDS in the four years between filming and release), reverent and irreverent. It’s a recommended listen for fans of the genre.