Directed by Ken Hughes
Written by Ruth Avergon
Starring:
- Leonard Mann as Detective Judd Austin
- Rachel Ward as Eleanor Adjai
- Drew Snyder as Professor Vincent Millett
- Joseph R. Sicari as Taj
- Karen MacDonald as Carol
Release Date: September 11, 1981
Rating: 
A killer case of Americanized giallo, grim and razor-sharp, reading like a criminal-psychology thesis gone noir. Leonard Mann is Lt. Judd Astin, hunting a decapitating biker who slices through Boston’s night-school girls with nothing but a sharpened Kukri. Ken Hughes’ last film is his swan song, a brutal final exam of style and substance, with Hitchcockian precision layered over Langian theory. Don’t expect a tricky whodunit—the killer’s identity is fairly obvious—but the tension comes from peeling back the warped minds behind the crimes. Under Astin’s lens: Eleanor Adjai (Rachel Ward in her scorching debut), the slick anthropology professor Vincent Millet, and the twitchy peeping Tom Gary.
Night School brims with wit that’s almost shocking for a thriller of this exploitative stripe—it’s still a slasher, after all—but Ken Hughes doesn’t waste a single neuron on the cerebral psychosexual undercurrents of the tightly wound screenplay, which rattles with unrelenting suspense. Maybe that’s why it earned a spot on the notorious Video Nasties list: a scabrous crime thriller unafraid to dig into the thorniest corners of human sexuality. It doesn’t need gore to provoke; the sheer audacity of its subject matter carries the shock. Slick, serious, and clever as few slashers dare to be, it finishes with a sneering, ridiculous finale that might just be the most unexpected gag in the genre.
