Directed by Bob Bralver
Written by Russell V. Manzatt and Michael W. Leighton
Starring:
- Pamela Ludwig as Toni Daniels
- Dean Hamilton as Jeff Jacobs
- Roy Thinnes as Dean Grail
- Donald Grant as Byron Rogers
- Courtney Gebhart as Jonelle Watson
- Kathleen Kinmont as Julie Ann McGuffin
Rating: 
This late 80’s self-aware slasher features a smattering of both the meta-narrative schlock of subsequent 90’s slashers and the grimy smut of earlier 80’s slashers. And yet somehow it manages to be a total washout on both counts while implementing into its formulaic Americanized giallo premise an utterly incongruous satire of college frats. Pamela Ludwig plays a journalism major investigating the strange disappearances of some female students on campus, who seem to have fallen victim to a hooded killer wielding a double-headed axe. It sure sounds very much like your favorite sleazy whodunnit premise, and it is for a marginally entertaining bit, but this is indeed more of a Rush Week than a Bloody Week. More juvenile antics than stalk-and-slash horror.
Notorious for being a slasher paradox: it’s bloodless and harmless, with insulting set pieces that craft thrills only to devolve into off-camera slayings. Funnily enough, it does live up to the raunchy benchmarks of the genre: plenty of peeping toms, more tits than in a Playboy magazine and horny as fuck even by juvenile standards. As such, the sleaze is on point, but it’s the rare kind of sleaze that never suits the purposes of its horror milieu. It’s very over-the-top, there are even instances where Bob Bralver’s wonky filmmaking feels like it’s primarily gag driven rather than shock driven. Rush Week is the ostensible gag-oriented slasher that manages to confound suspenseful goings-on with a multifaceted form of SNL sketch. Ludwig, though attentive and engaging, strikes me as being in a completely different mood than what the muddled filmmakers posit; she’s clearly in a horror narrative, but her surroundings are most definitely not. “A frustrating viewing” would be a neat summation of what it meant to watch Rush Week for me, but without any euphemisms: One of the worst slashers I’ve ever seen.
