User reviews

AKA One by One. For the first hour The Majorettes plays like a very typical, mediocre 1980's slasher movie. We get teenage girls stripping off in the locker room, a creepy, pervert school janitor and a killer who likes to slash victims throats. But then the boyfriend of one of the female victims goes on a one man crusade against a redneck, drug dealing biker gang in an hilarious gun fight with completely over the top sound effects! And then the plot goes back to the killer, I'm not giving away spoilers but it had me laughing. Brought to us by writer John Russo and directed by Bill Hinzman, both of Night of the Living Dead (1968) fame, this is a real oddball slasher movie, I found it quite amusing but for the wrong reasons. The British VHS release was heavily cut, best avoided.

Come for the slashing. Stay for the big hair and random machine gun shootouts. The Majorettes might not be great art, but you can't say it's a movie where you know where it's going 5 minutes in. You might think you do, but trust me, you don't. Whether it works or not as a moot point, because The Majorettes takes you on a ride. Those expecting a straight up slasher/whodunit might start to twiddle their thumbs, but if you keep an open mind and just embrace all the film has to offer, you might enjoy it.

A killer is going around in an army camouflage jumpsuit slicing up the desirable high school majorettes with their trusty knife and leaving their bodies immerse in water. Lt. Roland Martell is put onto the case with the help of the local sheriff, but the body count is rising. There are some punk bikers and their leader is a prime suspect, but could it be the perverted school janitor or maybe his deceiving mother who plans to take over the inheritances of the old lady she's looking after.

What in the name?! This is one extremely patchwork film that has so much going on in its heavily plotted premise that it feels like everything has been chucked into a blender. Yummy camp that's frightening for all the wrong reasons. I was rubbing my eyes in disbelief in how ridiculously stupid it gets! What starts off as your conventional copy and paste high school slasher turns into an embarrassing revenge action story. Huh? Where did that come from? We watch one of the characters go "Rambo" on us. It's raining down gunfire and unnecessary explosions. Pure anarchy! These sudden incomprehensible shifts in the fitful story truly made it one unpredictable smörgåsbord of gratuitous 80s cheese. The slasher element is poorly done, but sticks to the main gruel. Vixens who get their clothes off when they can. A POV shot with heavy breathing to inform us it's the killer. Bloody murders (although they are mostly the same old repetitive kills; knife to the throat routine) on "unexpected" victims. And red herrings around each corner. The banal nature of this segment suddenly turned moronic in falling by the wayside. The a-wire action is plain bizarre, and rather guilty entertainment. A lot people bite the dust and there are unexpected surprises in who does too. Sounds complicated… well no, just messy and padded out.

Some of the key players in Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" are who to thank for this shamble. The premise is taken from writer John Russo's own novel and the script he dragged off it is completely insipid and dank across the board. Is the novel that bad? The amateurishly leaden acting makes matters even worse and there's no real central figure rounding it off. The ladies in the picture look nice, but do little else. Bill Hinzman (zombie in the graveyard in the opening scene of "Night of the Living Dead") is in the director's chair, but you wouldn't know it. One or two decent stalk scenes are there, but there wasn't much control and direction seemed quite non-existent. Being plastered with a low budget immensely brings it down and leaves a lot to be desired. The off-kilter story just didn't make too much sense or did the other pointlessly out-of-left-field sub-plots to the bigger picture. It feels fairly longer than it actually is and this erratic mood swings enhanced it even more. A tacky one-note music score is especially jerky and the stale camera-work only hurts your eyes. Mindlessly idiotic and mundane accurately sums up the hack-eyed presentation and feeble production.

This z-grade stinker entertains in its unintentional wackiness, but you can find yourself doing it tough in a glut of unbearable shoddiness. Be afraid… be very afraid.

It's not even a good movie. To many standards, this would be considered a bad movie, bordering on awful. But it's intention was B-horror, so what can you really say? To be fair, my review is a tad biased, since I've been reading a book called "Making Movies" by John Russo, the writer of the screenplay and the novel. He discusses the making of this movie in several chapters, and hence I became hugely interested in checking out this obscure horror flick. So I bought a copy of the video on Amazon.com for a cheap price, eager to add it to my collection. I always enjoy (being an avid video/DVD collector) having movies in my collection that virtually no one has heard about. Hell, there are people out there who aren't avid video/DVD collectors who have movies like "Gladiator" and "Independence Day" in their collections. So I don't want to jump on the bandwagon. Besides, I'm always curious (outside the collection circle) about obscure independent and low-budget films. So the minute I received "The Majorettes" in the mail, I was more than psyched to watched it right away.

Needless to say, this is a truly amateurish work. The dialogue is horrible and the acting is even worse. The film itself isn't very well made, but the atrocious acting was so bad that it distracted me from the cheesy aesthetics. But at least I got some laughs out the deal, though unintentional. The death scenes were poorly edited. They were edited somewhat like a R-rated movie edited for television, cutting mostly to close-ups and medium shots of the killer, until we finally cut to the knife being slashed across the victim's neck. Then we see a little blood. That's the only gore we see, and I'm sure that's due to poor production values. We basically just see the victims drenched in blood, to let it be self-explanatory that the victims got stabbed in other places. But the only effect the director was able to pull off was the neck-slashing.

The plot is flimsy, full of way-too-obvious red herrings (the evil nurse, the creepy janitor, the fanatical priest--just to name a few), and when we finally discover who the killer is, we don't have a clue as to what his/her motive was. It's basically just thrown in there to have the audience go, "Wow! I had no clue he/she was the killer!" I was definitely surprised to find out who the real killer was. I just didn't think it made much sense. And towards the third act, the plot meanders, totally abandoning the majorette-killer premise and seguing into another subplot.

So I have a lot of bad things to say, regarding to how this movie was made. Who wouldn't? I think a better approach would've been camp horror, rather than serious horror. But I got enough laughs from the bad acting (the actors literally never change expression and sound more like they're running through a first read-through) and didn't really need the actors to wink at me and confirm that they're in on the joke. Nevertheless, it has a certain so-bad-it's-good quality. It's like a train wreck. It's really bad, but you just want to see what happens and who gets out alive. I ain't gonna lie, this movie really interested me, in the way that monster movies used to interest audiences back in the 50's. So if you're looking for fun, B-movie entertainment--then I would recommend checking it out. But there's one other minor criticism I have to let out: the lack of gratuitous nudity. There is nudity in the film, but it's not exploitative. If this were a first-rate, or even second-rate, film that would be a good thing. Basically, you see the sides of the girls' breasts, but rarely do we see frontal nudity. Call me a perv, but if you're gonna make a bad B-movie, you may as well thrown in a ton of nudity. It's not like feminists are gonna be watching this!

My score: 5 (out of 10)

No wonder, nobody bothered to comment on this piece of s...! What starts out to be a slasher (and a extremely bad one, that is) then suddenly change direction and becomes an action movie, with a lot of gunfight and explosions!? I can only hope that the book is better (which it doubt).

So don't bother watching this. There's not enough blood to make it a good stalker/slasher flick, and there's not enough action to make it a good action movie. The plot(?) is non-existing, the acting is worse than bad, the "effects" are really dull (all victims get their throat cut, how inventive) and even the editing is bad.

You're better off renting the old classics like Friday the 13th, the prowler, helloween and if you liked the action part of this movie you're better off with all Craig R. Baxley's movies.

I actually know someone who liked this movie, but I'm with the other users who didn't care for it. To my mind, it would only be somewhat worthwhile to watch it if you'd first read John Russo's Making Movies: The Inside Guide to Independent Movie Production, where he goes into some detail about some of the aspects of making The Majorettes. Incidentally, in that book he states that the budget was about $200,000. That seems about right. It certainly didn't look like it was made for any more than that!

In the movie, someone dressed in camouflage and wearing a camouflage hood is killing (primarily) high school majorettes with a knife. He leaves their bodies in whatever water is nearby: a lake, a pool. There are plenty of red herrings. There's a dope dealer and his gang, a peeping-tom retarded janitor, the janitor's sinister nursemaid mother. The killer is revealed about an hour into the movie, and it largely turns into an action film from that point on.

If you're an avid fan of George Romero's 'living dead' series then you might recognise the name Bill Hinzman: he played the graveyard zombie who attacked Barbara at the beginning of Night of the Living Dead. After several negligible roles in other Romero movies and assorted jobs behind the scenes, Hinzman decided to have a bash at directing, his first effort being this tawdry slasher/revenge flick based on a novel by John Russo (who also provided the screenplay).

Opening with a gloriously tacky opening credits scene showing a group of sexy, lycra wearing babes (most of whom look a bit too old to still be in high school) busting some moves, closely followed by a shower scene during which we see the pervy school janitor taking snapshots of the girls through a ventilation grille, the film certainly starts promisingly—heavy on the 80s cheeze and sleaze, it looks set to be a blast. Sadly, even though the gratuitous nudity continues throughout, and is accompanied by plenty of violence (but not much in the way of decent gore), the sense of fun soon wears off thanks to the truly awful performances (the girls certainly weren't hired for their acting ability), Russo's woeful script, and Hinzman's uninspired direction which only goes to prove that lurching around like a drooling ghoul in front of the camera is a darn sight easier than calling the shots behind it.

4.5 out of 10, generously rounded up to 5 for the silly-but-bloody OTT Peckinpah-style shootout at the end.

A big, camouflage wearing psycho killer is going around offing the girls in a high school cheerleading squad. It's up to the local Sheriff (Mark V. Jevicky) and a big shot detective (Carl Hetrick) to weed through the possible suspects. One recurring clue: this killer seems to have a thing for the purifying qualities of water.

At first glance, this would seem to be a VERY typical slasher, albeit one directed by the legendary Cemetery Zombie of "Night of the Living Dead", S. William Hinzman, and scripted by John A. Russo, based on his novel. There's zero suspense and zero scares, but Hinzman goes through the motions adequately, serving up lots of nudity and violence. Some of the actors are reasonably amiable, but the performances are, by and large, amateurish and dull. (Russ Streiner, a.k.a. Johnny in NotLD, appears here as a pontificating priest.) The trying-to-ape- John-Carpenter electronic score is good for some chuckles, to be sure.

Where this actually gets interesting is at the two thirds mark. Here, the killer gets revealed, and even if you've guessed their identity correctly, it's a hoot that the way that the plot thickens. Then the killer, due to their compromising position, is obliged to help a character from a subplot take care of their problem. (Reminding this viewer of the 1975 Giallo "The Killer Must Kill Again".) Things go bad for almost everybody, and eventually the story turns into a tried-and- true revenge saga! This finale comes complete with some nifty explosions and bloody squib action.

The final third of the picture may be a turn-off for some die hard slasher fans, but just speaking personally, it's what helped to make "The Majorettes" more than just run-of-the-mill for this viewer.

Seven out of 10.

This lame attempt at a film was based on Russo's book by the same name and as with all of Russo's movies one wonders how Night of the Living Dead could be so good. Cheerleaders get knocked off in very boring, predictable, and basically uninteresting ways for the first hour and then it becomes a shoot-'em-out, for no real reason, so long that when they get back to the cheerleader killer plot line you forgot what you were watching. Acting is bad, but dialogue is worse, and only one man can take the blame for that.

The last scene (don't worry I won't spoil it) is surprisingly well done though and I like the last plot twist. The action were well shot, but in the wrong movie. Ultimately you can't be mad at the movie because it's just as confused as you are, but Mr. Russo has no excuses.

Hey … what's with all the harsh and negative reviews on "The Majorettes"? I watched this movie before checking out what people thought or even taking a glimpse at the rating and thought it was a surprisingly enjoyable film! I was convinced it would have some loyal fans among the reviewers, but strangely enough practically all comments are discouraging others to see it. Well then allow me to be one of the only souls on the Internet promoting this eighties action/horror oddity!

Avid and knowledgeable fans of the genre will immediately recognize two of the displayed names in the opening credits of "The Majorettes"; i.e. John Russo and Bill Hinzman. Both these gentlemen played fundamental roles in the establishment of one of the greatest milestones in cinema of all time; George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". Russo was the co-writer and Hinzman played the legendary cemetery zombie with whom the invasion of the dead all begun. They went onwards with lesser successful careers in the 80's (Russo wrote and directed the obscure "Midnight" and Hinzman put together the dreadful "Flesheater"), but "The Majorettes" was their mini-reunion!

That being said, "The Majorettes" opens exactly like you expect an 80's horror movie with such a lurid title to start! With a posse of chicks in tight gym suits doing aerobics to the tunes of dreadful pop music and then collectively stripping nude to hit the showers. So far so good, I'd say… After that it's getting even more typically 80's with voyeuristic janitors, love-making couples getting slashed in the backwoods and harsh bullying all within a span of five minutes! "The Majorettes" can overall be filed in the slasher cabinet, but there's certainly more than meets the eye. The plot is reasonably ambitious and there are some clear attempts to generate tension and atmosphere in between all the gratuitous nudity and brutal gore. A vicious killer dressed in a military camouflage outfit goes around slitting the throats of high school majorettes. The local drug dealer and boyfriend of the first victim is the main suspect, but it seems that the real killer has much more religious motivations for his killing spree.

I spent quite a number of years looking for "The Majorettes" before finding it on a DVD-compilation along with "Hell High" and "Hitcher in the Dark". I have no idea why it's so relatively obscure, as it really isn't any worse than the vast majority of 80's stalk & slash movies. Quite the contrary, at least this movie tries to insert some significant twists and additional story lines. It's a mishmash of obvious red herrings and genuinely inventive plot twists. The whodunit factor is reasonably well-structured and effectively keeps you guessing along. The teen characters are also surprisingly likable and not at all the stereotypical bimbo-dimwits you anticipate to encounter in this sort of films. The acting is adequate (the copper with the mustache not included), there's plenty of excitement and the special effects are pretty cool. As far as yours truly is concerned, "The Majorettes" is one of the slasher-sleepers of the decade and urgently needs a fan base!

PS: Keep an eye open for the sequences with the grandmother! She looks as she had no idea she was on a film set!

I had great expectations for THE MAJORETTES when I found out that JOHN RUSSO (co-author of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) had based it on his novel. Sadly I had no idea of the disappointment that awaited me inside the cover of this hugely mediocre effort.

A masked killer - disguised in army surplus garb - is stalking and murdering the young female members of a majorette team one by one. The brutal slayings leave authorities baffled as there seems to be no apparent motive for the vicious and ruthless attacks. It's left up to the surviving members of the group to watch their backs before they become the assassin's next victims.

This is easily one of the 'cheapest' of the period slashers and is best avoided by fans of the genre. Atrocious acting, muggy cinematography and a theme tune that sounds like it was knocked up on a $25 keyboard (honestly!) add up to make an extremely unpleasent viewing experience. The only redeeming feature is that the killings - that were heavily edited in the BBFC's print that I watched - are surprisingly well executed and look like they might be pretty gory in an uncut print. If only director Hinzman had showed the flare for the rest of the film that was evident in the murders, he could have made this a half decent thriller. But the problems really begin when the maniac's identity is revealed far too soon leaving the closing half of the film filled with a poor and unconvincing action-revenge plot that looks like it owes more to Gary Busey's EYE OF THE TIGER or RAMBO than it does any slasher flick.

Sadly MAJORETTES ended up being a major-let down...

I must be weird, when everyone else talks of John Russo they think of "Night Of The Living Dead", when I talk of John Russo I think of mind-numbing crap like "Satan Claws", "Midnight", and this cinematic turd. For an hour it's a horrid "horror" movie about a slasher picking off Majorettes (the girls that are not hot enough to be cheerleaders), then it turns into a gawd-awful action movie. Hey, John, pick a genre and stick with it. Don't show the world that you suck at every kind of movie equally.

My Grade: F

DVD Extras: "one by one" Featurette; Yearbook; "One by one" trailer; Soundtrack; Trailers for "Flesh for the Beast", "Flesh Eater", "Slaughter Hotel" & "Faceless"

A fairly standard B-grade slasher-thriller. Basic plot that is formualic and predictable. Performances that are quite hammy. Low production values. Unimaginative direction.

Daft but strangely endearing horror which starts out as a by-the-numbers slasher with a traditional masked and camouflaged heavy-breathing killer stalking the local college kids, but by the end the film resembles Commando.

There are only a few decent acting performances (Tommy, Nicole, Teela, Bart) but generally the performance are terrible and pretty funny, especially the over-acting by Tom Desrocher (Mace Jackson).

In the middle is a sub-plot about a dodgy nurse who is trying to bump off a few characters with the help of her village idiot son, who looks a bit like Stephen King in Creepshow.

I saw the film advertised years back in Fangoria and I liked the look and sound of it: it wasn't quite what I expected but it's enjoyably daft if you aren't looking for perfect.

In the same Fangoria piece, director Bill Hinzman makes the absurd claim that the makeup effects guy on 'The Majorettes' Jerry Gergely, is better FX man than Tom Savini.....having seen both mens work, I can safely say Tom is in a different league (he is most of the time anyway).

Catchy title tune by the way......

'The Majorettes' is a cheesy 80's slasher that has some interesting elements such as the inheritance subplot and the complete genre switch up towards the last act where it becomes a revenge flick. Despite having all the elements in place to be an effective fun time with a masked killer, plenty of violence and several twists and turns, the movie's horror elements are rather weak devoid of any thrills or tension and the kills are very lacklustre.

The plot - The local high school Majorettes are being killed off by one by one by a mysterious masked killer, while at the same time a local gang are causing trouble at the high school as-well.

This movie should have just stuck to one genre, namely the slasher story and made it a good one or went with the second half of the story the action/revenge part, as the combination in this feels very jarring with neither comes together organically. The mystery of the killer felt very MEH and what should have been an unnerving moment, comes across as who cares. The subplot with the evil nurse and her mentally challenged son could have really added some much needed suspense or intrigue to the story, but even that becomes pointless towards the end.

Overall 'The Majorettes' could have been a cheesy fun time, but instead it falls flat at every turn.

The general opinion is that this slasher flick by the "Night of the Living Dead" co-creators John Russo and Bill Hinzman really sucks. And in this case I'm afraid the general opinion is right on the money. What you basically have here is a bunch of barely legal Hollywood bimbos/Motley Crue groupies playing barely illegal high school majorettes who, when they're not prancing around in butt-hugging leotards or skimpy bikinis, are taking long, hot showers and getting butchered by a maniac in military fatigues. I guess I'm not entirely complaining, but these ingredients do not necessarily a good horror movie make.

The problem is this movie is derivative to the nth degree. At one point the movie lifts a scene (in a swimming pool) almost verbatim from "The Prowler". And I think this film sets a new record for stupid characters saying, "So and so, is that you?" I'd almost think this was meant to be a pre-"Sceam" parody/homage of the slasher films, but it is neither particularly funny nor clever, just tediously unoriginal. The only thing that sets it apart from other bottom-of-the-barrel slasher dreck is a really stupid action/revenge sub-plot where the studly quarterback takes on a particularly unconvincing motorcycle gang (and if there was one genre that hit bottom more consistently than the 80's slasher films it was the 80's action/revenge films). Amazingly, this empty-headed film was actually based on a novel by John Russo. I would read that instead--it can't possibly be any worse.

This film essentially begins in a small town with a high school majorette named "Nicole Hendricks" (Jacqueline Bowman) attempting to seduce a fellow student by the name of "Tommy Harvack" (Colin Martin) in a car parked out in the woods at night. Unfortunately, her attempt is cut short when a masked man suddenly appears and kills the two of them with a large knife. Not long after the bodies are discovered, the local police detective "Roland Martell" (Carl Hetrick) and "Sheriff Braden" (Mark V. Jevicky) immediately begin an investigation but are stymied by what few clues are left behind-and within days the killing spree really begins. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this picture certainly had potential as it combined the elements of a 70's high school sexploitation film with that of an 80's slasher movie. Yet, even though Terrie Godfrey (as "Vicky McAllister), Sueanne Seamens ("Judy Morino") and the aforementioned Jacqueline Bowman were all quite attractive, the acting was mediocre at best and there simply wasn't enough suspense to make this film stand out to any great degree. That said, while I don't consider this to be a bad film necessarily, it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.