CO-ED FRENZY
A Look At BLOW OUT’s Slasher Film Within A Film
On July 24th, 1981, Filmways Pictures and Brian De Palma released BLOW OUT, a haunted, neo-noir riff about paranoia in the political age that also acted as a form of a remake of Michael Antonioni’s 1966 masterpiece, BLOW-UP. The film served as DePalma’s follow-up to his still controversial DRESSED TO KILL (1980), a prestige suspense film that showed off the director’s best flourishes, punctuated with a Euro-horror flair. Angie Dickinson’s slow-motion death in the elevator early on in the film feels like something Dario Argento could have orchestrated. While DRESSED TO KILL netted a respectable $30 million at the box office, it couldn’t compete with the real growing cinematic subgenre—the slasher film.
One month prior to DRESSED TO KILL’s release, Paramount Pictures launched FRIDAY THE 13TH into theaters. Its $59 million box office run nearly doubled that of DRESSED TO KILL’s and proved that, no matter how high the glossy art is in erotic thrillers, audiences will always hunger for cheap grunge and cheaper gore. So, the ever-cheeky DePalma relented and gave audiences the best of both worlds: a meticulous, obsessive thriller coupled with brief comedy interludes about a ludicrously bad slasher film called CO-ED FRENZY. BLOW OUT’s main character, Jack Terry (John Travolta) is working on the sound for CO-ED FRENZY, and the cross-pollination of films leads De Palma to one of the bleakest endings of the 1980s.
The opening moments of BLOW OUT are the opening moments of CO-ED FRENZY, putting us in the POV of a breathy, knife-wielding maniac, wreaking havoc at an unknown sorority on a dark, windy night. It is a pitch-perfect capsule spoof of slasher films. There’s Pino Donaggio’s creepy synth score underlying every bit of the killer’s movements and adding a little oomph to the usual Casio beeps and boops of lesser body count entries. De Palma’s fluid, floaty camera works perfectly in tandem with the usual POV shots of the killer wandering around looking for blood to let. Speaking of, there’s only one victim we see in CO-ED FRENZY, a Peeping Tom security guard, which is complete, tongue-in-cheek irony from the director, whose voyeuristic themes are out in full force for BLOW OUT.
In a way, though De Palma’s work is often more distinguished, CO-ED FRENZY shows us that every wonderfully lurid impulse of his oeuvre is on display here (coeds hooking up with their boyfriends, women dancing together in see-through lingerie, a lonely, bra-clad female engaging in a little “self-care”). It is the director exercising zero restraint, unmoored by the pressure of the brilliant, tightly constructed plot of BLOW OUT, and issuing a playful lob at critics who took pause with the sexuality and violence of his previous films, something he would later tackle in a more meta-fictional way with the adult shocker BODY DOUBLE.
De Palma isn’t content to let these potential victims stay as one note characters. His script bakes in just enough of a spark that lift them off the page for the briefest of moments—the little annoyed bit about “big fink and little fink,” create a sense that these sweaty, dancing dames and their put upon, studying neighbor existed as foes prior to the start of the movie. Even the “bad screamer,” the actress that is about to be killed in the shower by the stalker has so much character in their pathetically poor yelp as they’re about to be murdered.
De Palma even encapsulates the type of low budget film studio that would release a flimsy slasher like CO-ED FRENZY, one that alludes to his work as a purveyor of grindhouse-y erotic suspense—the studio is Independence Pictures Incorporated, resting snugly above a bank of XXX theaters.
Early in the film, Jack and the producer discuss the myriad titles that they collaborated over the years on, one of which, charmingly enough is BORDELLO OF BLOOD (no, not that one).
To further emphasize the reality of the films that the studio is distributing, posters of schlocky, but well-made titles like WITHOUT WARNING and SQUIRM adorn the walls (along with lesser movies like Ulli Lommel’s THE BOOGEY MAN).
There were shockingly little fraternity/sorority slasher films in 1980 and 1981, at least ones that could have influenced BLOW OUT’s opening moments.
The closest one to its release was Jimmy Huston’s FINAL EXAM, released in February of ’81—itself a college set slasher about a particularly unremarkable looking killer, stalking and slashing coeds—reflected in the plain clothes, frumpy looking madman (the guy looks like a pissed off tax accountant) of CO-ED FRENZY.
As for the other necessary element of the slasher film that is presented here—the asthmatic POV of the psychopath—there are a few clear cut hack and slash titles that had to have influenced De Palma: John Carpenter’s legendary opening murder from 1978’s HALLOWEEN, the jittery, unnerving POV of “Billy” from Bob Clark’s BLACK CHRISTMAS (like CO-ED FRENZY, we never get a clear reason why that particular maniac is operating) and the aforementioned FRIDAY THE 13TH, which is less remarkable than its sequels, but has a brilliant use of point of view that exists to put the audience not only in the killer’s shoes, but to deceive them as well—a clever suspense tactic. Though it is a matter of curiosity what films inspired De Palma’s play on the body count films of the ‘80s, since they were still being freshly minted, it’s unclear what was in his head when he lensed the faux slasher.
It can be hard to parse through the worthy college slashers that came in the wake of BLOW OUT, to find ones that successfully continue the ‘80s gloss that De Palma so adequately nailed with CO-ED FRENZY.
There’s the Dallas-set THE INITIATION, which has the breathiest killer POV the ‘80s ever offered. For the atmospheric chills, alongside the spills, one would need to look to Tom DiSimone’s HELL NIGHT. One of the best college-set slashers would end up being THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW, its esteem owing to the fact that its director, Mark Rosman, was a protégé of De Palma, envisioned in the many, dazzling shots Rosman captures throughout. The closest approximation though is a mainly modern film, shockingly enough: 2012’s THE SLEEPER, a retro bloodbath directed by Justin Russell, about a group of pledges who find themselves in the murderous grip of a psycho called … you guessed it, The Sleeper. It’s quite sharp, a little slowly paced (find an eighties slasher that isn’t …) but worth the time of anyone who craves modern takes on body counters from the past.
CO-ED FRENZY takes up just a few moments of BLOW OUT’s runtime, but is indelible enough to leave a mark, one where we could have happily seen a feature length horror film from the Maestro, something that we got a little later in the ‘80s with his BODY DOUBLE and its driller killer at the core of that film’s mystery. Still, what we have is enough to satiate longtime fans of the director and of slasher films alike.
