Okay, find yourself a piece of paper and a pen, and prepare yourself to take studious notes to plug into a flow chart later. Trust me, you’ll need it to keep all the suspects, couples, and victims straight in our next squishy whodunit, Girls Nite Out:

We open at Winston Hill Sanitarium (for the very, very nervous) and spy the night nurse, deeply involved in a paperback novel until her phone rings. When she answers to a silent line, the soundtrack clues us in that something sinister is afoot -- that or the organist got her finger stuck in that one dissonant key. Then the phone rings again; this time it’s Dickie Cavanaugh’s room extension -- Wait, the criminally insane are given their own phones? All she hears is some obscene breathing, but this is enough to warrant further investigation. Entering his room, she finds it seemingly empty; and after several suspenseful turns, she opens the bathroom door -- just in time to see Cavanaugh jump off the toilet and hang himself. We only see him from the neck down, but as his body spasms out, the nurse screams and runs for help.

We abruptly switch locales to the gym at Dewitt College, where the Dewitt Bears basketball team is on the verge of making the conference championship. Down by one point, with the ball, and only a few seconds left, the coach calls time out. Chastising his star player, Pete "The Maniac" Kriesniac (Marty McChesney), to get his head in the game, the coach breaks the huddle and sends his team back on the court. Before the whistle blows, Maniac’s best friend, Teddy Ratliff (James Carrel), pulls him aside and begs him to forget Leslie -- his girlfriend, who dumped him after two-year relationship -- for just seven seconds to win the game. As the cheerleaders and the Dewitt Bear Mascot -- a dopey looking bear costume with a blonde wig, googley eyes, and exposed tongue waggling down -- gets the home crowd warped into a frenzy, the ball is put in play and Teddy makes a perfect assist to Maniac, who sinks the winning basket as time expires.

And with a nickname like Maniac, and his jilted lover status, we’ll go ahead and call him Suspect #1.

While the crowd storms the court, with hi-fives all around, Charlie Kaiser (Larry Mints), the campus radio station’s play by play announcer, reminds everyone over the airwaves about the big Gamma Sorority Retro-Party following the game -- and their infamous Annual All Night Scavenger Hunt follows tomorrow night. In the locker room, as the team celebrates its victory, Benson (Matthew Dunn) sheds the mascot costume and starts putting the screws into the surly Mike Pryor (David Holbrook). When the needling almost come to blows, we find out why after we switch to the girl’s locker room. As the cheerleaders change clothes, Sheila Robinson (Lauren Taylor) confides in Lynn Connors (Julie Montgomery) that she’s been seeing Benson behind Mike’s back. Bragging up Benson’s sexual prowess, Sheila plans on breaking up with Surly Mike as soon as she gets up enough courage. Later, Lynne meets up with Teddy, her boyfriend, and Maniac outside the gym. They also run into Dancer and Hagen (Paul Christie and Gregory Salata), our comedy relief for the next hour and a half, who break out their shtick. 

And when does comedy relief go from odious to malignant? When it’s done with a bad French accent. That’s when!

When Teddy asks these two idiots if they're coming to the Gamma's party, we, as the audience, can only hope they say no -- but Dancer and Hagen say they wouldn’t miss it, even though it pales when compared to the All Night Scavenger Hunt.

Next we cut away to a drunken man, digging a hole. When a van pulls up, the digger yells at the driver for being late and expositions the plot a bit. The drunk and driver are gravediggers, and the hole is for "that nut" Cavanaugh. It seems that many years ago Cavanaugh was a student at Dewitt, who went nuts and killed the daughter of the campus security chief. So no one will miss him but his sister, who paid them to bury him (Plot Point #1). After laying the shrouded corpse on the ground, the driver grabs a shovel to help dig. Suddenly, a shadowy figure comes out of the dark, grabs another shovel, brains both men in the head, and then proceeds to pummel them into a bloody pulp. Dumping and burying both bodies in the shallow grave, the assailant steals the van, and as it pulls away, we pan over to where Cavanaugh's body was laid, but all we see is a blanket; the body is gone (Plot Point #2).

Back at the campus, Lynn, Teddy and Maniac stop buy the Student Union for some food at the cafeteria. When Teddy places an order with the friendly Barney (Rutanya Alda -- and Barney is an odd name for a girl), she tells him no charge; it’s on MacVey (Hal Holbrook), the campus security chief. (Yes it was his daughter that was killed.) Mac congratulates them on the big win and moves on, and while they eat, out of nowhere, Maniac does his Mrs. Bates impersonation for Lynn:

Reenacting the climactic scene in Psycho, where Vera Miles spins the chair and we realize Norman's mother is really a corpse, definitely qualifies as foreshadowing in this movie, giving us Plot Point #3.

Later, Lynn changes into her costume for the party. Drunk already, Teddy and Maniac send her on alone but promise to catch up, later, at the party. Making her way down a lonely path, the soundtrack holding the same sustained dissonant chord again, a rogue POV-cam comes to life and starts stalking Lynn. But it's only Ralph (John Didrichsen), the nerdy and repressed towel boy for the basketball team, and he just wanted to return a scarf she had dropped. Together, they head into the party house and find things in full swing. Alas, Hagen and Barney are there, playing strip poker with Jane (Laura Summer) and Kathy (Carrick Glenn). When Teddy and Maniac finally show up, since Lynn seems to have disappeared, Teddy starts hitting on anything with a skirt while Maniac spots Leslie (Lois Robinson), and tries to be friendly, but she only reinforces that it’s over between them. As the party progresses, Hagen and Barney tell a group of pledges the legend of Dickie Cavanaugh: They say Dickie was taken out into the woods for the Bear Ritual -- a fraternity rite of passage (otherwise known as hazing.) But when he came back from the woods, his mind stayed behind and he’s been loony-tunes ever since. Expositioning the plot some more, one of the pledges calls it bunk, saying Dicking got hung up on some cheerleader, and when she dumped him for some other guy, right in the middle of that year's Scavenger Hunt, the jilted lover killed her in a jealous rage (Plot Point #4).

Meanwhile, Ralph, feeling his beer, is currently on the dance floor, cupping a feel wherever he can, resulting in several slaps to the face; and the grief from his peers and his general bizarre behavior makes Ralph Suspect #2. And Teddy is putting the moves on Dawn Sorenson (Suzanne Barnes) since Dawn’s boyfriend, Bud (Tony Schultz), is passed out just two feet away -- but that doesn’t deter Teddy.

Dude? Don’t you have a girlfriend? Geez, from now on, this guy will be known as Teddy, the Creep.

On the other side of the room, Surly Mike catches Benson and Sheila making out, confirming his suspicions. He confronts Sheila and the two make a scene. Then Mike loses it, claiming that if he can’t have her, then no one will. And as his tantrum escalates, it brings the party to a screeching halt. Breaking the nervous silence, Mike calls all the girls whores and promises that he won’t forget this and storms off. Officially making Surly Mike Suspect #3. The party derailed, Lynn finds Teddy, the Creep, and pulls him off Dawn. As Teddy, the Creep, makes excuses, saying Dawn is just his cousin, things wind down and everyone heads home. And at the radio station, groovy Charlie Kaiser signs off for the night but reminds everyone to tune in tomorrow for the great Scavenger Hunt.

Back at the dorms, after finishing his shower (a private showers in each dorm room? Wow, this is some ritzy college), there’s a persistent knock at Benson's door. When he opens it, he recognizes the knocker and smiles -- until he takes three knife blows to the chest. As Benson slumps to the floor, dead, the killer gathers up the mascot costume and in a raspy voice says, "I need this more than you." That deed done, the killer then breaks into the radio station and copies the clues for the big Scavenger Hunt.

Elsewhere, Lynn and Teddy, the Creep, are having a post-party talk in bed. Knowing full well that Dawn wasn’t his cousin, Lynn says she isn’t jealous but insulted. Teddy, the Creep, apologizes and blames his behavior on the booze and promises to try and do better. (Don’t feel bad, I don’t believe him either.) Suddenly, they hear something outside, and when Teddy, the Creep, goes out and investigates, he only finds a spring-loaded cat soundbyte. (Honestly, I never saw the cat.)

The next morning, MacVey finds Surly Mike stewing on a park bench. MacVey heard about the disturbance at the party and what he said. Not wanting history to repeat itself, he confronts Surly Mike on what his intentions are. When Mike, being his surly self, tells him to mind his own business, MacVey (wisely or unwisely) complies. Later, while Lynn meets up with Sheila, Leslie, Jane, Kathy and Trish (Susan Pitts) at the library to strategize for the Scavenger Hunt, Teddy, the Creep, sets up a rendezvous with Dawn later that night since his real girlfriend is occupied. Also preparing for the evening's of festivities, the killer has taped together four serrated steak knives into a deadly claw that he attaches to the mascot costume. Donning said costume, the unknown killer swipes the deadly claw in mock attack and then sets to do his dastardly deeds -- but not before checking himself out in a mirror first.

And yes, with those googley eyes and exposed tongue, I believe that this most assuredly qualifies as the silliest looking screen killer of all time...

That evening, Groovy Charlie Kaiser takes to the airwaves and the entire campus listens in for the start of the great All Night Scavenger Hunt, where, over the next six-hours, his listeners must find 36 items hidden all over the campus. To accomplish this, Charlie will give out six cryptic clues per hour for what to find, and where to find it, and the winner gets an all expenses paid trip to a Caribbean resort. With the first clue given, the chase is on -- and the DJ notices that someone’s been tampering with his notes. Narrowing down the clue to two possible places, Jane and Kathy split up to save time. Jane thinks the clue leads to the campus squash court -- turns out she was right, and finds the first item there. Bending over to pick it up, not realizing the Killer Bear has snuck up behind her until its too late, Jane screams as the killer -- forgive me -- bear hugs her. And while calling her a slew of nasty names, he uses the deadly claw to rip her throat out.

The second clue leads the team of Sheila, Leslie, and Trish into the campus boiler room where they find the second item. And I guess the absence of Lynn during all this makes her a weak Suspect #4. At the radio station, Groovy Kaiser takes a phone call. It’s the killer. Saying in the same raspy voice that Jane was the first, he then asks if Kaiser knows who’ll be second and hangs up. Writing it off as a crank call, the DJ broadcasts the next clue.

As the Scavenger Hunt progresses, Dancer and Hagen are in their room, smoking reefer and making up lewd clues to some sex scavenger hunt, and judging by the thickness of the haze, they’ve been at this for a while -- eliminating them as suspects. Elsewhere, as Dawn relaxes in her bubble bath, the soundtrack settles on the single dissonant organ note while someone sneaks up the stairs toward her bathroom. Lucky(?) for her, it’s only Teddy, the Creep, and they don’t intend to spend the evening in the bathroom talking.

This time, the killer calls MacVey directly and says his daughter, Patty -- the one Dickie killed, remember -- wasn’t a nice girl and deserved to die. When MacVey demands to know whom he’s talking to, the killer says it’s obvious; he’s Dickie Cavanaugh. MacVey says that’s impossible, he’s locked up in the loony bin. (But he did have his own phone.) After the killer laughs and hangs up, MacVey rings up the sanitarium, demanding to speak to the man in charge. Meanwhile, Leslie and Trish find the item in the beech trees. Tuning in for the next clue about bats in the belfry, it again has two possible answers; either the baseball field, or the attic of the college chapel. Splitting up, Trish heads to the field while Leslie heads toward the chapel.

When MacVey finally gets through to the sanitarium, he rips into them for letting a dangerous lunatic like Dickie Cavanaugh out to make threatening crank calls. But the doctor says that’s impossible because Cavanaugh committed suicide. MacVey asks if he’s sure the killer's dead. Of course he’s sure; Dickie's dead and his sister came and picked up the body to be buried. And the unknown sister, who might turn out to be any of the girls left alive -- and my money’s on Trish -- is definitely Suspect #5.

Entering the chapel, Leslie stumbles around in the dark until the lights mysteriously turn on. She spots the Bear Mascot and assumes it's Benson. And it turns out the legend of the size of Benson’s *ahem* manhood is so great, that Leslie isn’t too alarmed when the raspy voice promises her a good time tonight. But her convictions quickly change as he leads in with the deadly claw -- which would have been a nice Dr. Tongue 3-D effect but the cameraman was having a little trouble with the focus. We cut away before Leslie can even scream, and that makes two off screen deaths -- usually very rare in one of these things.

After Teddy, the Creep, and Dawn finish doing the deed, they agree that it will be better, for both of them, if they just consider this a one-night stand and leave it at that. Teddy, the Creep, gathers his clothes and leaves. But we can eliminate the both of them as suspects, and Lynn, too, as she walks into the chapel while the Bear Mascot walks out. When she says "hi" to "Benson" and heads inside, one has to ask this question: Did Benson spend a lot of time in that bear suit walking around campus? Back at the radio station, Groovy Kaiser gets another call from the killer who says "the twins are together again." 

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Yeah, Dickie had a twin sister, pushing this unknown sibling up to our new Prime Suspect. Sorry, Surly Mike. Quick, back to the review before the killer strikes again!

Lynn finds Leslie’s body, and after a general freak out, reports it to MacVey -- who calls the radio station and orders Kaiser to pull the plug on the Scavenger Hunt, and to ask everyone to return to their rooms in a nice orderly fashion: "Attention students. Attention. There is a psycho-killer running loose on the campus. Do not panic. Repeat. Do not panic...

The police arrive and start to tape off the chapel. when word comes that more dead bodies are showing up all over campus. This so upsets the Dean that he turns the whole mess over to MacVey. The next morning, the police begin interviewing suspects. First up is Lynn, since she found the body. Saying the only reason she was in the chapel was because of the Scavenger Hunt, she then remembers that Benson came out of the chapel while she was heading in. As one of the detectives head off to find Benson, MacVey calls up Groovy Kaiser and asks if he remembers anything vital in his brief conversations with the killer. When Kaiser says he’s got them all on tape, MacVey is a little indignant that this wasn’t brought to his attention sooner, but tones it down and asks if he can have the tapes immediately. Next, since one of the victims was his ex-girlfriend, Maniac is the next to be interrogated -- and we realize he was conspicuously absent the entire night. So do the cops, but Maniac swears he has an alibi, having spent the night at the Bonaventure Hotel with a prostitute. And last, but not least, is Surly Mike who gets raked over the coals due to his vitriolic outburst at the party. He seems sincere with his denials of involvement, and frankly, he's just too obvious so I'm not going out on much of a limb when I eliminate him as the killer. And the suspect list gets even shorter when word comes that they found Benson's body in his dorm room.

As MacVey plays the tapes while perusing some old news clippings about the murder of his daughter, he spies a picture of Dickie Cavanaugh in the story -- and dang it if he doesn’t look familiar. And when the tape plays the last message, about the twins being back together, the quarter drops for MacVey. Grabbing a pen, he starts scribbling long hair on Dickie's mugshot. Then he stops short, realizing who the sister is -- Dickie's twin, Katie -- and just realized who that really is!

Well, at this point, there aren’t that many girls left and only one of them is old enough to be his twin sister. So, it’s obvious who MacVey has pegged. I realized it, too, and frankly, I feel the movie is getting off cheaply with this ancillary character being the killer and call shenanigans on the whole flam-dam thing! So who is it? Read on...

Leaving the distraught Lynn behind, Teddy, the Creep, enters the darkened Student Union and makes his way to the cafeteria. Have you figured it out yet? He finds Dawn on the floor, bleeding, but still alive. As he tries to help her, Dawn's warning that the killer is behind him comes too late. From out of the darkness, Barney attacks him with a butcher knife and stabs him repeatedly. 

...Barney? Barney who? You all remember Barney, right? The weird named waitress we met way, way back at the beginning of the movie? Yeah. Me neither. Like I said, SHENANIGANS! 

Before she can deal the mortal blow, MacVey shows up. Calling her Katie, the killer pauses. He tries to reason with her, but Katie isn’t really here right now. Talking with Dickie’s voice -- think Norman/Norma Bates here, and it is kinda creepy -- Dickie/Katie confesses to killing his daughter and all the others because of their philandering ways. MacVey keeps trying to convince her that Dickie is dead. Suddenly, Katie reasserts herself and scoffs that Dickie isn’t dead. In fact, he’s here. She walks over to the freezer door and opens it -- revealing the frozen corpse of her twin brother sitting in a chair. Slowly, the camera zooms in and we see the corpse is wearing the bear's deadly claw. And the slow zoom continues on the frozen face until the frame freezes for...

You know, I really enjoyed the movie Scream; it pushed all the right nostalgia buttons for me. Too young when the stalk-n-slash films first hit big, being the little horror-movie-degenerate that I was, I constantly pestered my older brothers and sister for detailed plot accounts of the murder and mayhem in the films they'd managed to see, like Halloween, Happy Birthday to Me and Friday the 13th. And then I finally saw one: somehow, Prom Night aired on NBC and it was all we talked about at school the next day -- and the day after that. Clearly, I was hooked. I also clearly remember when my entire 5^th and 6^th grade class -- all eleven of us from good old Holstein Public -- got invited to Larry Eckhardt’s birthday party. His folks had one of those new fangled RCA laser disc players -- the old style, where the disc was as big as an old LP record -- and had rented for us Star Wars, Enter the Dragon and Friday the 13^th. Since I had already committed the plot and murders at Crystal Lake to memory (thanks, sis!), I spent the entire movie warning those with sensitive stomachs to turn away during the strategic moments. However, I refrained from revealing that final jump-scare -- and my god, that room exploded when the mongoloid jumped out of the water!!!

I’ll admit, I was laughing right along with you, gawking at the naked boobies, and reveling in the gore. But I was yearning for the days of intricate plots, red herrings, and not so obvious killers and truly surprising revelations. And then along came Scream, and, for a brief, glorious moment, I was eleven again and very happy. I say brief because the stalk-n-slash movie went through the same decline of quality as it did before -- only a lot faster this time beginning immediately with I Know What My Tits Did Last Summer. ...What?

Before you shoot off the e-mails, yes, I realize Kevin Williamson cherry-picked and stole the plot from a number of earlier slasher films, I don't care. And as much as I like Scream, I truly despise Scream II and Scream III.

See, it wasn’t the killings that fascinated me (thank heavens); sure, they were gruesome, but I was more interested in the warped motives, the bodies piling up everywhere, and, of course, the false leads and red herrings. I always looked forward to the end, when the killer would reveal themselves and spill how they did it and spew why they did it. In the end, the motives seldom made sense, and it was always impossible how they pulled it off, but I didn’t care. At some point I realized that these types of films could be broken down into two sub-genres: the Whodunit, and the Psycho-Degenerate. Much, much more do I enjoy the Whodunits, where you don't know who the killer was, than the ones with the indestructible Psycho-Degenerates who ran amok, buzz-sawed through their cast, and cracked wise. Wanting to focus solely on Whodunits for this retrospective, I decided to sub-out Don't Go in the Woods -- a pretty rotten example of the Psycho-Degenerate film -- and sub-in Girl's Nite Out as a last minute replacement.

Shot on the Upsala College Campus in New Jersey, the film does get its small college atmosphere right. I got the biggest kick out of how the entire campus tuned into the campus radio station -- that had a golden oldies format; the same five golden oldies over and over and over... I don’t think anyone, besides the communications majors, even realized we had campus radio station at my college. (KFKX! 97.3 on your FM dial!) It didn’t help that we only had like a 1/2-Watt transmitter -- if you were in the parking lot of the building, you could almost tune it in. You had no listeners, but it was good practice -- and you could get away with saying "booger!" on the air. (The station also had a kick ass collection of vinyl LP’s. And no you can’t look through my LP’s to see how many I "liberated.")

The film’s credits for writer, producer, and director are littered with the same four names, and together, this mess is the best they could come up: the same old tried and true (and tired) excuse of killing whoever is literally screwing around. The rules of the slasher movie were embedded in bedrock by now: stay chaste or monogamous, like Lynn’s character, and you’ve got a get out of jail free card. Remember, the killer walked right by her, and had a perfect opportunity to kill her, but let her go. As for the cast, Hal Holbrook barely breaks a sweat as MacVey -- and I honestly don’t know if his son, David -- making his screen debut, being in the cast had any influence on him being in this movie. Montgomery went on to play Betty in Revenge of the Nerds, and Alda keeps popping up occasionally. The rest of the cast does an OK job, but were never heard from again.

Girls Nite Out arrived just as the genre was slowly petering out the first time. It did have a theatrical release through Al Adamson’s Independent International Pictures, and was eventually released on HBO home video. It was also right in the middle of the style -- with some pretty disastrous results. There's nothing new going on here; the mystery is bland, and has no punch. And this is compounded when the filmmakers don't overcompensate with a ton of gore, bizarre killings, and a ton of naughty bits. The only thing it has going for it is the unintentional humor of it's killer, disguised in that idiotic bear costume, and that's stretched pretty dang thing by the end, making for one long movie to muck through. Yes, the killer's costume is -- well, unique, but the gore effects are terrible -- Ketchup Splatter, another stinky sub-sub genre. Beyond that, the deaths are uninspiring and I don't recall any nudity at all.