Horror Movie Review: Girls Nite Out (1982)

It’s back to the 80s with a familiar but entertaining slasher horror. Girls Nite Out was directed by Robert Deubel, and stars Julia Montgomery, Suzanne Barnes, Rutanya Alda, and Hal Holbrook.

DeWitt University has a problem. Someone is killing off the students on the night of the big ‘only female’ scavenger hunt. A killer disguised in the school mascot costume and one that might have links to a previous murder by a student who was locked up in a sanatorium. Although, that person commits suicide at the beginning of the film, right?

All the tropes are here and in glorious 80s style. Grown adults playing young adults, boys being obnoxious and girls being sassy. Sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and slashing. If you’ve seen any college/university slasher before (and there are a lot of them), you’ve seen Girls Nite Out. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not a decent film, because it is. A very decent film.

Part of its charm comes from just how 80s it is but even then, it bucks some of the trends by trying to go in depth with a few characters. It’s not massive amounts of detail but a few, the main cast, get a little more to work with and it makes them far more interesting to watch. Even if they’re often just caricatures of 80s young adults.

That being said, it also has way too many, to the point where remembering names becomes hard work. Which doesn’t exactly help when people are getting killed off. Who was that? Where they important? What was their character? Even if you wanted to care, the film doesn’t make it possible.

Elsewhere, the story hums along at a decent enough pace. There are moments where it slows down too much but normally in the run-up to someone dying. An area that the movie does well. Lots of terror and lots of blood. However, what Girls Nite Out really wants to do though is shock you with its twist. Doing a good job of keeping you guessing about the identity of the killer but then pulling the rug out by making it someone who was barely in the film.

Is it a good twist if you never would have suspected the person because they had about two minutes of screen time before the big reveal? At least the motivations of the killer make some sense.

Watching this film in modern times, it is every bit the walking cliché you would expect, so you are going to have to look at it within a bubble. While, it wasn’t even the freshest slasher in 1982, what we know as clichés today weren’t clichés then. Keep that mindset and Girls Nite Out becomes a much more enjoyable flick.