[7] The film has developed a small cult following among slasher fans, and was given its first DVD release by Warner Archive with a remastered transfer in 2011.

The distraught director of the center tells Judd that Anne worked there during the day and was attending night classes at Wendall College.

At the hospital, Judd and his partner Taj discuss a similar case from the previous week, in which another girl was decapitated with her head found in a pond.

At Wendell, the administrator Helene Griffin tells Judd that Anne was close to a girl named Kim Morrison.

The professor doesn't provide much information but introduces Judd to an exchange student named Eleanor Adjai.

Judd visits Professor Millett and is surprised to see Eleanor, who explains that she is his research assistant.

When Judd goes to Professor Millett's home again, he finds a collection of skulls taken from tribal headhunters worldwide.

She confesses the killings to her boyfriend and justifies the crimes by comparing them to tribal rituals he teaches in his courses.

As the police approach, Millett puts on the helmet and flees on his motorcycle to divert the suspicion from Eleanor.

Night School was shot on location in Boston, Massachusetts, largely in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, in the spring of 1980[8] on a budget of $1.2 million.

[9] Irwin said "Ken was a true genius with staging, blocking, timing, pacing and performance and had the classic British mix of sarcasm and self-deprecating humor.

[2] Vincent Canby of The New York Times dismissed the film as "a not very scary story" in a short review.

[10] Variety called it "a low budget exercise in terror offering very little diversion or novelty for fans of the already gutted 'psychotic slasher' genre".

[11] Richard Harrington of The Washington Post wrote that the film "aspires to something more, but ends up falling back on a half-dozen killings and the grizzly uncovering of the victims' heads.

Irwin works with a subtle palette and his 1981 Boston is suffused with the vivid dampness and ember glow of Jack the Ripper's London (without the fog)".

[13] George Anderson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called the film "one of the tamest ... horror flicks to date".

This was part of a similar trend in Spain and Italy; other examples are films deceptively titled Alien 2, Tiburón 3 (literally Jaws 3) or La Casa 3, standing for a third sequel to The Evil Dead.