RUSH WEEK uses a battle-axe to put a nail in the coffin of the eighties slasher film as you'll see on Vinegar Syndrome's Blu-ray.

Returning to campus after a year-long ban, fraternity Beta Delta Beta makes its goal to gross out the campus during Rush Week but someone wants to sever more than "the bindings of social constraint" when law student Julie Ann McGuffin (Kathleen Kinmont, BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR) vanishes after a nude photo session in the science lab for a client with strange tastes. Journalism transfer student Toni Daniels (Pamela Ludwig, OVER THE EDGE) only stumbles upon the scoop when her interview with college dean Grail (THE INVADERS' Roy Thinnes) is interrupted by Julie's roommate Sarah (Heidi Holicker, VALLEY GIRL) and her tape recorder picks up their conversation about the girl's disappearance. The dean insists that Julie flaked out, and Toni's hippie stoner faculty advisor Cosmo (singer Gregg Allman) pushes her to focus on covering Rush Week. Amidst a prank war with upstanding rival fraternity GAE (the subject of gay jokes, of course), BDB president Jeff Jacobs (Dean Hamilton, SAVAGE LAND) romances Toni, but she is not the only one who notices his odd behavior, going from mischievous to brooding with a habit of taking late night walks around the times that other coeds mysteriously vanish. When Toni learns from Jeff's buddy Byron (Donald Grant, MONSTER IN THE CLOSET) and her own best friend Jonelle (Courtney Gebhart, SUMMER SCHOOL) that Jeff has not been the same since the murder of his girlfriend – who happens to have also been the dean's daughter – she may be putting herself in more danger as she pursues the story and succumbs to his charms.

Coming at the tail end of the direct-to-video second slasher boom of the late eighties, RUSH WEEK is slickly-made and attempts to be diverting as more of a whodunit than a body count picture. The main problem is that it seems stuck in between the slasher genre and the even more outmoded ANIMAL HOUSE-style college comedies with moments of comedy and drama scuttled by contrasting comic scenes including replacing the GAE recruitment film with gay porn and a prank played on hired hooker Alma (Toni Lee) with a dead body. The main characters and the cast are engaging and production values look higher than some of the film's DTV contemporaries, but the lack of onscreen gore may disappoint (the film could probably have played on network TV if not for the nudity). Had the film been made five years earlier with the requisite amounts of gore and nudity – even with MPAA pruning – it might have been a decent entry in the slasher genre; as such, RUSH WEEK is at its strongest in representing the state of the genre during its lowest point.

Released direct to VHS by RCA/Columbia, RUSH WEEK gained much of its audience on television with USA Up All Night screenings, while Simitar Entertainment's fullscreen DVD of the video master was once ubiquitous but has become hard to find. The film's rights wound up with Orion somehow, and thus became part of MGM's library. Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from a new 2K scan of the original 35mm interpositive which does restore the film's gloss and one can see that it was indeed intended to be marketed theatrically. Gone is the analogue video smeariness that made the film's darker interior scenes and blue-gelled moonlight exteriors murky and cheap-looking, and the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 rendering of the Ultra Stereo track presents the unambitious mix clearly with music having the most presence bass-wise in a few scenes. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.