Given the title, it's pretty obvious from the get-go that Stupid Teenagers Must Die, aka Blood & Guts, is going to be a really stupid slasher film, and the opening credits leave no room for doubt by informing viewers that the film was "shot and cut to hell" by Jeff Smith. (Smith also directed, co-wrote and otherwise contributed to just about every aspect of the movie.) If nothing else, you can't criticize Stupid Teenagers Must Die for pretending to be something it's not. That's good because even the slightest trace of pretension could well have made this movie completely unwatchable.

The movie boasts excessive violence, gratuitous nudity and zero budget. Obviously, a good many critics and viewers have banished it to bargain-bin hell already, but I believe it does have a few entertaining moments -- and the gore isn't half-bad for such a low-budget production (I especially liked the range of arterial blood sprays).

Basically, you have a group of teenaged stereotypes lifted right out of the 1980s come together in a murder house to conduct a seance. Naturally, they pool all of their car keys together so no one can up and leave in the middle of things -- this becomes a problem because they keys disappear right about the time that the kids start dying grisly deaths. Despite their collective knowledge that there is a killer in the house (be it one of them or the ghost of the serial killer who lived in the house), the stupid teenagers keep wandering off by themselves -- with predictable results.

As the body count rises, the teens begin to turn on one another and conspire among themselves. The whole thing gets rather silly in the end, but horror geeks -- especially those of us who came of age in the 1980s -- should appreciate the spoofy goodness and numerous one-liners this film lays down along the way. I'm not saying this is a good movie -- indeed, some horrors fans will undoubtedly hate it -- but it does have guilty pleasure potential for those of us with a particularly twisted sense of humor.

I'll definitely take Stupid Teenagers Must Die over the umpteenth installment of Scary Movie.