Massacre at Central High (1976): Part One.

Before the opening morning bell rings at Central High School, a new student quickly learns the ropes from an old friend. Seems these two used to go to a different school together a while back, but we soon learn this new environment will prevent them from ever becoming solid friends again.

Here, the first thing David (Maury) learns from Mark (Stevens) is that he runs with a gang of domineering hooligans, who rule the school through bullying tactics and intimidation. Led by a psychotic senior named Bruce (Underwood), this group, let's call them the Elite, is rounded out with Paul (Douglas) and Craig (Bond), who are currently terrorizing a few other classmates; a form of casual torment to reinforce the campus pecking order.

Amazingly, the school puts up with the Elite because, one, due to their efforts there is an extremely enforced and peer-pressured induced peace in the halls; and two, honestly, there doesn't appear to be any teachers at this school anyway, making both points rather moot.

Now, the main targets for these Nazi-wannabes are the general riffraff and nonconformists like Spoony (Carradine), a burnt-out peacenik, who they catch and punish when he tries to draw a swastika on Bruce's locker; and Rodney (Sikes), a motor-head peasant from the poor side of the tracks; and the aptly named Mary and Jane (Smith, O'Grady), who spurn all advances from Bruce and the Elite and have been unfairly branded as "a couple of bull dykes in need of a good f@ck."

They also pick on Oscar (Winner) because he's overweight; and Arthur (Kort) because he’s an intellectual and a cripple (-- he wears a hearing aid); and Harvey (Logan) because he's a nerd -- you get the general idea: anything deemed below their ersatz Aryan ideal are hazed well beyond a Purple-Nurple or a Rear Admiral.

As a newcomer, David would also most likely be a target of the Elite but Mark intervenes on his behalf. Apparently, at their old school, David intervened when Mark got into some serious trouble. The exact details are a bit sketchy, but David really saved Mark’s hash and prevented some grievous bodily harm while being curb-stomped. And so, owing him big time, Mark works hard to convince Bruce and the others to leave him alone -- in fact, he encourages Bruce to let David join the Elite.

Bruce agrees to this, but turns out David isn’t all that impressed with them or their tactics; but he plays along, at least for now, for Mark’s sake.

However, things change when Bruce and the others hijack Rodney's old jalopy. Here, Paul pushes the car well past the factory specs, eventually shelling out the motor, and renders it useless.

The bullies all laugh at this, because of course they do, leaving the powerless Rodney behind to stew on his misfortunes. After witnessing this abuse with no repercussions, David quietly peels off and slips away from the Elites -- never to return.

Meanwhile, after helping trash Rodney's car, Mark meets up with his girlfriend, Teresa (Beck), who is worried about the moody and mercurial David. But Mark says not to worry, and guarantees his old friend can take care of himself.

Speaking of David, angered by what he saw, for a moment, this obviously intense and volatile young man appeared ready to "Hulk-out" on his old friend and his buddies, but instead vents his rage at the power elite by running, and running far away to burn this anger off -- this time.

But you definitely get a sense that a reckoning is well-past due at Central High, and this is the man who will finally deliver it. Thus, setting the stage for the next inevitable incident; for who knows what will happen when this emotional powder-keg inevitably goes off…

Dutch filmmaker Rene Daalder was born on the island of Texel just off the coast of northern Holland on March 3, 1944. At the time, the Netherlands was still under Nazi occupation, as they had been since May, 1940. Allied liberation began in September, 1944, when the ill-fated Operation: Market Garden failed to meet its objectives and collapsed, leaving most of the northern and western parts of the country still under German control.

This led to the Hongerwinter (Hunger Winter), a period of famine and starvation due to the exceptionally harsh seasonal weather that year and a food and fuel embargo initiated by the Germans against their remaining controlled territories as a form of punishment, which lasted until their eventual surrender at Lüneburg Heath in May, 1945.

The 1-2-3 Film Group (Daalder, top right).

Having grown up in the immediate aftermath of all of this, these events would prove to have a huge influence on Daalder’s career. As a teenager in the 1960s, he became a member of The 1-2-3 Film Group with Kees Meyering, Frans Bromet, Rem Koolhaas and Jan de Bont. A self-described “anti-auteur collective” on Daalder's personal website (renedaalder.com), they would collaborate on several short films “with a vaguely situationist slant in the conservative Holland of the ‘60s.”

“I was used to this whole notion of everybody doing everything. You just shot and put it together,” said Daalder in an interview with David Jones for byNWR. “So, I learned to do everything that had to do with film -- music, mixing, whatever, just from doing it. It was a democratic group, so we actually made movies by drawing lots, and that determined who was going to be the director or the writer or the cameraman or the actor.”

(L-R) Rene Daalder and Jan de Bont.

First out of the gate was 1-2-3, Rhapsody (alias De 1-2-3, Rhapsodie, 1965), a series of skits written, staged, filmed and slapped together by the collective, which was sort of a Luis Buñuel short by way of a Monty Python sketch.

This was followed by Body and Soul (alias Lichaam en ziel, 1966), another short, which concerned a bodybuilder who no longer has control of his muscles. This leads to an existential crisis over his efforts to perfect his body, was it all worth it, and a fear that he should’ve concentrated on his mind instead.

The short was co-written by Koolhas and Daalder, who also directed, and was shot by de Bont. All three would do the same on Body and Soul 2 (alias Lichaam en ziel 2, 1967), which was a tribute to famed Holland actress Andrea Domburg, who pulled a Greta Garbo and disappeared from the scene until Daalder managed to coax her out of self-seclusion.

Domburg would also star in the trio’s first feature film, a bizarre morality play called The White Slave (alias De blanke slavin, 1969). “Taking inspiration from B-movies and Buñuel, The White Slave is a hall of mirrors that toys with clichés and inverts them into campy provocations,” said Mathias Gatza (Fiktion, 2016).

“A man named Günther Unrat arrives in the Netherlands looking for ‘good Germans’ who helped fight the Nazi occupation. He quickly gets mixed up in a nefarious organization that inspires him to follow in the footsteps of the consummate ‘good German’ Albert Schweitzer by setting up a camp for young Dutch women, who think they are training to work in Africa as nurses. Blinded by idealism, Unrat fails to see that his shady partners are scheming to sell them into sexual slavery.”

Three became four as the collective would get an assist from Oliver Wood behind the camera on The White Slave. The British born Wood would then migrate to America, where he served as a DP on The Honeymoon Killers (1970), a Cult Classic, and Don’t Go in the House (1979), a skeevy exploitation picture about a killer with a flamethrower and mommy issues. But after Neon Maniacs (1987), Wood would go on to shoot films like John Woo’s Face/Off (1997) and The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007).

Jan de Bont would also migrate to America, where he shot things like Private Lessons (1981), Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (alias Night Warning, 1981) and Roar (1981), which he barely survived after getting severely mauled by one of the dozens of lions roaming the set, losing most of his scalp (to the tune of 120 stitches and staples) on one of the most insane films ever made -- from conception to execution it is totally bonkers, and I highly recommend a viewing.

But he, too, moved up the Hollywood food chain shooting films like Cujo (1983), Die Hard (1988) and The Hunt for Red October (1990) before graduating to the director’s chair for Speed (1994), Twister (1996) and The Haunting (1999); but that last one kinda derailed his career and for good reason -- it is that terrible. Some 25 years later and it still hasn’t really recovered.

As for Daalder and Koolhaas: “The White Slave marked the beginning of an exodus for us and several of my Dutch filmmaking friends,” said Koolhaas (Fiktion, 2016). “It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to emigrate to America to start a new life in Hollywood.”

Daalder would make the jump to Hollywood in the mid-1970s after co-writing the Dutch film The Last Train (alias De laatste trein, 1975) with Erik van Zuylen. There, he would come under the wing of the exploitation king of big breasts and raw violence, Russ Meyer -- The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), Mudhoney (1965), and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965); which would’ve been around the making of SuperVixens (1975) and Up! (1976) and Meyer’s collaborations with 20th Century Fox and noted film critic Roger Ebert -- Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979).

(L-R) Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert.

Now, Daalder felt Meyer was equal to the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in terms of New Wave Cinema. But the exact details as to how he wound up in Meyer’s orbit proved maddeningly elusive -- aside from a few passing references that Daalder was recruited by Meyer as an apprentice or cameraman in some capacity, but all failed to say why or on which film, giving them a certain whiff of conjecture. (Not a judgment but an observation, as conjecture is one of our own cinematic staples.)

What is known for certain is that Meyer was set to back a feature production by Daalder based on a script he co-wrote with Koolhas called The Hollywood Tower, which presciently predicted the future of Hollywood with startling accuracy -- at least according to the summation found on Daalder’s website:

The Grand Island Independent (July, 1970).

“It is 1974, the year of Hollywood’s death. But like a rising Phoenix, the dream factory is destined to reinvent itself. Sold to extremely wealthy oil moguls, the studios abandon their original calling of making live-action movies and are now producing movies with databases and computers able to digitally resurrect the movie stars of the past. Some, however, resist the phenomenon and initiate the last ‘flesh and blood’ movie by the last mogul of the true humanist cinema.”

This last mogul was to be played by Meyer. “I wrote it in 1974 with Rene Daalder,” said Koolhas (Spiegel International, March 27, 2006). “And it consists of three levels:

“At the first level, wealthy Arabs buy up the Hollywood film archive and build a computer with which any star can be put back on the screen. The second level deals with the Nixon administration, which spends a fortune helping out-of-work actors -- including Lassie -- get jobs in the movies again. Finally, the third level is about Russ Meyer, of course, who is shooting a porn film -- the last form of humanism.”

Alas, even though negotiations had already begun with Tippi Hedren to star and Chet Baker for the music score, The Hollywood Tower didn’t get much farther than that as Meyer felt he couldn’t swing the budget when 20th Century Fox stopped releasing X-rated films and officially pulled the plug.

“Unfortunately, Meyer didn't think it was the right material for him,” said Koolhas, who would abandon filmmaking not long after for a rewarding career in architecture and design.

However, as a consolation prize, Meyer would recommend Daalder to producers Bill Lange and Harold Sobel, who were looking to make an independent horror film similar to the one Tobe Hooper shot in Texas back in ‘74.

The San Francisco Examiner (April 30, 1982).

Lange was a film broker based out of Chicago through his Brian Distribution Company; and like a lot of his ilk, he wanted to try his hand at production. He had a million dollar title -- Massacre at Central High (1976), a $500,000 budget, and needed a film to match both.

Sobel would provide the money and serve as the producer on the film. At the time, he had only produced one other film called Cauliflower Cupids (1970), whose plot of a gangster trying to go straight so his daughter will be accepted by her boyfriend’s family reminded me a bit of Oscar (1991), a comedic vehicle for Sylvester Stallone directed by John Landis.

Cauliflower Cupids was a vehicle for boxers Jake LaMotta and Rocky Graziano and anchored by Jane Russell. I’ve never seen it but noted sports reporter Dick Schaap (NBC) called it “just hilarious, this group of fistic greats may be the funniest collection of men ever assembled outside a police lineup,” so we’ll just have to take his word for it. As for his follow up feature:

“It was the first film made after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) that had the word ‘Massacre’ in its title,” Lange told Danny Peary (Cult Movies 2, 1983). In concept, “It was to be a pure exploitation film.”

When he was brought on board, Daalder wound up pulling double-duty, serving as screenwriter and director on the proposed picture. “We lucked into Daalder,” said Lange. “He was recommended by Russ Meyer, a good friend of mine, when I was looking for a director. We gave him some ideas on what we wanted in the plot [but] he wrote the script.”

Principal photography began in late February, 1976, and continued into early March under the false title of Incident at Foxdale High, as the production felt they would get more cooperation on shooting locations than under the grisly banner of Massacre at Central High. The exteriors were shot at Pomona College (Claremont, California), with the Carnegie building subbing in for Central High. Central High’s parking lot was a parking area in Griffith Park, which also served as part of the school grounds. And the hang gliding and car stunts were done at Decca Canyon near Malibu, with its famous hairpin turns.

Most of the interior scenes were shot at Villa Cabrini High Academy in Burbank, which had been temporarily shutdown due to some damages incurred by an earthquake. Still, “They probably wished they could’ve read the script first before letting us shoot there,” said David Kahler (Synapse, 2020), who served as an assistant director on the film.

Filming would last about three weeks. It was shot non-union to keep costs down, with the actors getting minimum union scale. Said Kahler, “Time is money, and when you have no money you don’t have much time.”

Danny Peary (My hero!).

As to what happened during that filming, in his write up of the film, Peary asked the obvious question: “So how did Massacre at Central High become a somewhat mysterious art film in which the required violence is not gratuitous -- as it is in most exploitation films -- but is used to illustrate political themes?” To answer that question, Lange pointed a finger directly at Daalder.

Apparently, the only real stipulations Lange and Sobel had was wanting nine dead teenagers by the end credits, and since CB radios were popular at the time, they wanted that phenomenon leavened into the script, too. Everything else was up to Daalder.

And while he openly ignored the citizen band aspects, Daalder would oblige them on the body count -- at least in theory. Because everything else leading up to those murders would be less of a horror movie and more of a lesson in civics as Daalder turned this exploitation body count movie into a political parable on the horrors of fascism and obedient complacency.

Obviously, Daalder was influenced by his post-war life experiences. One of the main themes in The White Slave is that there were good Germans and bad Germans. In Massacre at Central High, we have “good Germans” (Mark), and “bad Germans” (Bruce), but also collaborators (Teresa, at least to a certain extent, and we’ll get more into this later), underground resistance fighters (David), and the oppressed (everyone else).

Said Peary, “We have entered a surreal world, where in the absence of elders (as in Lord of the Flies) it is the young who set up a caste system and individually come to represent various ideologies.”

Daalder then sticks all of these elements into a petri dish devoid of any adults or adult supervision. As Peary noted, “There are references to the school librarian, Rodney’s father, the school janitor, and the principal, but we never see them or any other parents or teachers. Since none of the teenagers have surnames we must doubt that adults [even] exist in this world.”

It almost brings to mind some kind of progressive social experiment, where the children are given all the tools, a controlled environment, and are then instructed to educate themselves without any further interference. This is somewhat akin to the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, where volunteers were assigned roles as either guards or inmates, where things quickly got out of hand as things turned sadistic and violent.

At the beginning of the film, Mark refers to Central High not as a prison but a country club -- the Elite even have their own posh private lounge to hang out in. And no one ever seems to go to class. “We immediately can tell there's something mighty peculiar about this school,” said Peary. “It looks as foreboding as an insane asylum.”

But it's not just railing against fascism, as socialism also gets kicked in the teeth by Daalder as he weaves some Orwellian notions into his lofty narrative, too, and how absolute power corrupts absolutely, and how all revolutions are doomed to failure. It’s a mish-mash of ideas and ideals that can be difficult to parse at times as the film often contradicts itself in its ideology. Said Peary, “Massacre is clearly a political allegory, but what exactly is Daalder’s political message?”

In his review for the New York Times (December 5, 1980), where he wrongly assumed Rene Daalder was a woman, Vincent Camby wrote, “Massacre at Central High is both a teenage exploitation picture and its send-up. At the same time it’s a morality tale that works a few intelligent variations on Death Wish (1974), which didn’t have a single thought in its head. It might even be read as a metaphor for the rise and fall of the Third Reich. At times she (sic) seems to be saying ‘Don’t mess with established authority. Things can only get worse,’ plus a little of ‘those who live by the sword’ etc.”

But Amy Taubin of the Soho News (December 10, 1980), lured to a screening by Camby's glowing review, felt this “coming-of-age as Revenger’s Tragedy” was less Death Wish and “a more politically oriented Carrie (1976).” Said Taubin, “There is a free floating Third Reich theme that foreshadows the contradictions of punk."

And we’re going to dig into these notions further to try and solve this paradigm, believe me. But first, we have to finish sifting through all of Daalder’s presented evidence first. And for that, you'll have to tune in to Part Two of our Two-Part look at Massacre at Central High. Stay tuned.

Originally posted on February 8, 2003, at 3B Theater. 

Massacre at Central High (1976) Evan Productions :: Brian Distributing / EP: Jerome Bauman / P: Harold Sobel / D: Rene Daalder / W: Rene Daalder / C: Bertram van Munster / E: Harry Keramidas / M: Tommy Leonetti / S: Derrel Maury, Kimberly Beck, Andrew Stevens, Robert Carradine, Ray Underwood, Steve Bond, Damon Douglas, Lani O'Grady, Cheryl Smith, Rex Steven Sikes, Dennis Kort, Jeffrey Winner, Tom Logan