I was recently discussing how the horror movie as a genre nearly died between the mid-’80s and -’90s.

So, anyway, I just watched Hellmaster, released in 1992, only the cut I watched was dated 1990 and named Them, which imdb shows as a working title for the movie. There is an implication, therefore, that perhaps edits and reshoots were done between the version I watched and the version that was released to the public. Never having heard of the movie before, I couldn’t begin to guess.

Anyway, there’s this college, the Kant Institute of Technology, which purports to have a very high rate of graduates in the FBI and CIA, but at the start of the movie, the whole college is gathered in a normal-sized auditorium for the dean to take over teaching for a week, only there are maybe 30 students total. Also, the college only has one building, and it’s laid out like an old mental hospital[1].

I’m not sure if any of that is particularly relevant, but what does seem to matter is that a whole bunch of killers with crosses carved into their foreheads (among other things, in some cases, a la the video cover) are coming to kill the students for reasons that entirely eluded me. Also, John Saxon[2] has a three-pronged injector that he waves around menacingly in the midst of philosophical debates with the dean and some guy from six months ago (aka the prologue) who is bitter over losing his wife into the cross-head brigade and also I guess the surviving students at times?

I have rarely if ever had so little idea what just happened in a movie.

[1] Which, okay, is what it was, my accidental research has informed me. It’s possible I would not have appended “mental” if I hadn’t seen it in print, but it for sure looked like a weird old hospital, not a university building. Those, you see, are generally symmetrical.
[2] You’d know him if you saw him, assuming you’ve seen any significant number of ’70s and ’80s B-movies.