The absolute optimum in trashy titillation, MALIBU HIGH is unquestionably one of the sleaziest movies ever made, and a classic of its kind. This deliciously contumelious soap-opera centers around Kim, an embittered and mean-spirited high school senior. She's a "bottom drawer" student, thankless daughter, and calculating bitch who gradually advances to a street-hooking, avaricious, drug-addled mob hit-woman. Her race down the road to ruin begins when she's dumped by her scrawny feather-haired boyfriend, and transpires over the course of a single school semester. All the while, she remains fiercely determined to graduate with honors, and does so by way of seducing and blackmailing her male teachers. Several scenes conclude with a bizarre electronic music soundbite which sounds a lot like the one PBS used in their 70s/80s period station-identification spots.
The ignoble elucidation of Kim's spiraling self-destruction provides one of the most hysterically unbridled marvels of transgressive debauchery in drive-in movie history. MALIBU HIGH is a zestfully artless discourse in John Waters-flavored exaggeration, though of an entirely unpremeditated nature. Rarely has a film been as unconscionably libertine and unapologetically ostentatious...it's a priceless endowment for all lovers of nethermost cinema.
This is apparently the only film credit for leading lady Jill Lansing, which is unfortunate because she manages to flesh out her fairly complex character with surprising vibrancy . Tammy Taylor, playing the school's snobby rich girl, went on to a fruitful TV career and starred in the hot-mess gore howler DON'T GO NEAR THE PARK.
9/10...a must-see.
