Troma has been the last true independent studio standing in North America for over fifty years, and its whole enduring appeal is that it will put out both halves of a double bill like this one without blinking. On September 8, the studio drops two Blu-rays that could not be more different: Graduation Day, a genuine artifact of the early-eighties slasher gold rush, and Sweet Meats, a brand-new country-music cannibal musical. One is a beloved cult classic getting the deluxe treatment. The other is exactly the sort of gleeful nonsense Troma exists to unleash. Both belong on the shelf of anyone who takes their trash cinema seriously.
“Graduation Day” Was a Genuine Phenomenon
Here is the number that should reframe how you think about this movie. Graduation Day was made in 1981 for roughly $250,000, and it grossed somewhere in the neighborhood of $24 million. That is not a typo, and it is not a modest cult return. That is a nearly hundred-fold profit, the kind of ratio that got the entire slasher industry sprinting into production after Halloween and Friday the 13th proved there was gold in dead teenagers.
The film itself is a pure specimen of the form at its most enjoyably formulaic. A star runner at Midvale High collapses and dies after being pushed too hard by her coach, and days before graduation, someone in a fencing mask begins picking off the track team one by one, each murder timed with a stopwatch. Her sister comes home, suspicion falls on the overbearing coach, played by the reliably gruff Christopher George, and the body-count mystery clicks along exactly as the era demanded, complete with a killer New Wave band, Felony, performing at the gym dance while the bodies pile up.
Every Slasher Fan’s Favorite Trivia Answer
The reason Graduation Day endures beyond its box office is the cast, which is a genuine murderers’ row of genre trivia.
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This is an early, significant role for Linnea Quigley, four years before The Return of the Living Dead made her the definitive scream queen of the decade. It features Michael Pataki, who would go on to Halloween 4. And, most gloriously, it contains a pre-fame Vanna White, four years before she started turning letters on Wheel of Fortune, in one of the great “wait, is that?” supporting appearances in slasher history. A movie that lets you watch a future television institution get menaced in an early-eighties body-count picture has a permanent place in the genre’s heart, and the disc leans into that legacy.
The Tromatic Special Edition Earns Its Name
Troma’s disc treatment is more generous than the film’s reputation might lead you to expect, which is a pattern with this label. Beneath the schlock-merchant image, Troma has quietly become a real preservationist, and the extras here reflect it.
The package includes the traditional Lloyd Kaufman introduction, an interview with star Patch Mackenzie, a conversation with director Herb Freed, and interviews with producer David Baughn, editor Martin Jay Sadoff, and Quigley herself. There are audio commentaries, including one from a dedicated slasher-history podcast crew, plus the usual Troma coming distractions. For a movie a lot of people only know as a title on an old video store shelf, that is a legitimately loaded edition. It sits comfortably alongside the label’s other recent restoration work, like the Tromatic edition of the deranged regional oddity Luther the Geek, which proved how much care this studio actually puts into resurrecting the obscure.
“Sweet Meats” Is Troma Being Troma
If Graduation Day is the label honoring the past, Sweet Meats is the label doing what it has always done best: releasing something that no sane studio would touch.
The pitch is magnificent. Bobby Sweet is a country singer and the owner of a wildly successful burger chain, and his rise to the top of both the charts and the fast-food world rests on a secret ingredient in his hamburgers that is, let us say, not sourced from cattle. There are hearts involved in the grinding. It is a splatter comedy and a full-blown musical with original country songs, which is precisely the kind of unclassifiable swing that has always been Troma’s reason to exist.
Writer-director Ricky Glore also stars and does his own singing, which tells you this is a labor of demented love rather than a cynical product. Lloyd Kaufman turns up in a cameo, as is tradition, and the extras dig into the making of the effects and the writing of the songs. Nobody else is releasing a cannibal country musical in 2026. That nobody else would is the entire point.
The Case for Both
There is a specific pleasure in a studio that can hand you a preserved piece of slasher history and an unhinged new original on the same day, and treat both with equal seriousness. That range is why Troma has outlasted nearly everyone. The majors chase four-quadrant safety and quietly let their catalogs rot; Troma keeps the weird, the regional, and the genuinely dangerous alive, on disc, where it belongs.
Graduation Day and Sweet Meats both arrive September 8 on Blu-ray from Troma. Buy the first for the nostalgia and the Vanna White party trick. Buy the second because you will never get another chance to own a movie quite like it. Buy both because supporting the last real independent studio in the country is a thing worth doing.
