The right way to depict fascism on film.

MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH’s opening three seconds might be the best of all time: A body exploding in a wild fireball. Who’s body is it? Hard to say, it happens so fast. Don’t worry, we’ll know soon enough. What follows is a shot of a young man, in moderate strut, jogging past the serene mountain views of southern California. This is David, a student at Central High. A school brimming with teenage delinquents, nerds, hippies, etc.

David leads a simplistic lifestyle. He’s a thin, stone-faced young man — — as stoic as he appears. What fuels him are the simple pleasures of an athletic mindset, of jogging. Although what transpires in this opening segment of MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH could be described as anything but simplistic or pleasurable.

As David jogs to and fro mountain roads and beachside sand bars, we’re inundated with images of intense action: A car exploding; a couple having sex by a camp fire; the look of anguish on a young man’s face as he’s impaled by……something; more explosions; David running; more shots of bucolic, seaside splendors; teenagers beating each other to a bloody pulp; running, and more running.

The sequence ends with stoic, young David following a string of teenage students into the main halls of Central High. They are all at the crossroads of their lives.

No, this is not rated X Degrassi I’m outlining. This is a violent thriller flick about authoritarianism. Queue car screeching noise. To the point, it is about a marauding crew of bullies running a school with an iron fist. David, just another in a line of idealistic do-gooders with a moral conscience. Or so it seems.

Whenever a school bully terrorizes the math nerd, David acts as savior. Not out of some outsized act of empathy, but because he can discern, in the moment, the difference between right and wrong — — black from white.

In the course of CENTRAL HIGH’S 90-minute run, students go skinny dipping in the middle of the night, and have sex near campfires out by Big Sur. Whenever it’s time to squash beef, some of the hooligans ditch school and head out to vacant mountain roads where they’re left to scheme.

California’s varied topography lends itself to the film’s jarring scene transitions. It’s almost as if it were all a dream. Perhaps it is. More importantly, where are the adults? The film doesn’t even humor the question. These teenagers certainly don’t.

One day, David is maimed by the bullies in school. Why? Because his overwhelming duality represents a threat to the corrupt power structures that be. The pecking order will not be questioned, nor disrupted. In turn, David seeks revenge. Not through some justice system, but through abject brutality.

He seeks to instill pain and push death onto all who have wronged him, one by one. By doing so, he might even claim his place on the throne, rule Central High with an iron fist. But, as one character says in the film, “the higher you feel, the deeper you fall.” David is a teenager at the crossroads of his life.

MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH is, at heart, a film with a message. One that could be gleamed by those privy to that stuff, but the film stops short of proselytizing. Like any good exploitation flick, it revels in it’s outlandish violence. It invokes real-world darkness, but stops short of legitimizing it.

When we’re in Jason Voorhees’ pov, stalking his victims strolling through a forrest path, it registers as camp. Not serious. Do it enough, and it becomes thrilling and even funny at times. In a similar way, CENTRAL HIGH marks it’s victims with a dopy, shiny red x. These jocks have it coming, that’s for sure.

But David doesn’t utilize a knife, or a bludgeon. He believes that particle problems should be solved practically. Meaning: explosives and trip wires. Yes, something about losing a leg springs forth some inner knowledge on bomb building, and trip-wire maintenance.

It is the rare slasher/exploitation film in which kills aren’t committed in personal quarters, but through the triggering of incendiary devices. Students enter their cars in the school parking lot and bam! Gone. The rest scatter like mice.

The increasingly zany killings lead David to some ultimate conclusion. Alas, there has been a love story brewing in the underbelly of this film. An unrequited love subplot that thrusts this film towards a final scene which feels like one big political statement on the question of whether power corrupts those who obtain it like a disease, or is corruption something that exists within the individual all along?

MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH is the definition of a sleeper. A film that endures in the underground because it strives to say something salient about us in the best way stories about authoritarianism can: through the lives of children.

When the big bad has been toppled, who seeks to take reign in the vacuum of power? Can anyone be trusted? Suddenly, this school is rife with opportunity.