(1987, LT Films)

Diefenbaker High has been closed down by the school board, giving students an early summer vacation.
Now that Kevin is gone, who will take over his reign?
Would you believe a nerd and a teddy bear?

Running Length - 111 minutes

Number of victims: 22

Kevin Markson played by: Lafe Travis & Rod Harper

Virgil Pembury played by: Rod Harper

Production Details

Yes, Kevin Markson the school killer was dead and gone, and we did not want to bring him back any time soon. So we chose to create a new school killer. We invented the character of Virgil Pembury, a nerdy, geeky student, who would become the next psychopath. The transformation device we used was Kevin's supernatural will. Kevin, a prisoner of hell, could not come back to earth, but he could send an evil shock wave by means of his old stuffed teddy bear. Virgil the nerd would find this teddy bear in a garbage dumpster and soon become possessed of Kevin's evil. Once transformed, Virgil would get his own skeleton mask and begin killing off all the staff and students of Kevin's school.

The only problem is that the school has been closed by authorities in the wake of all the killings which took place there in My School IV, and probably wouldn't reopen for several years until the place was cleaned up a bit and all the bad feelings had faded. So Virgil goes around the neighbourhood, looking for students enjoying their summer vacation, and killing them.

But Virgil would start the killings with his own family members - which I considered to be quite tragic and disturbing. The first half of the film dealt with the degeneration of Virgil's character from a harmless nerd to a psychopathic lunatic. As he destroys his family members one by one, his madness shows itself bit by bit, getting worse each time. The scene where he bakes his pet cat in the oven and then feeds it to his father illustrates Virgil's inhumanity precisely.

The role of Virgil Pembury was played quite well by Rod Harper, who brought a whole new dimension to the role of a psychopath. His role was complimented by Kevin's talking Doom Teddy Bear "Eugene". The Doom Bear kept Virgil's evil side in check, making sure that the good side did not become too strong. The Doom Bear was a good invention, and was a way of expressing Kevin's will from his prison in Hell.

Some scenes in this film I liked were the capture and torture of the local paperboy, the tennis court killings, the guy getting killed taking out the garbage. The chainsaw death worked rather well. The opening of the film showed a brief recap of Kevin's death at the end of My School IV, and then had a new bridging scene with Kevin's tortured monologue down in hell, and how he planned on returning by means of the teddy bear.

This was the first film we actually wrote a whole dialogued script for. The arguments between Virgil and the Doom Bear allowed us to play a lot of comedy into the script. A few of the scenes were written one night when Rod and I were totally drunk -- I won't say which ones -- they turned out to be quite bizarre. The script had a full beginning and end, and followed proper plot structures exactly. I am still proud of the My School V script. Unfortunately, we shot so much footage for this movie, we had to make a second movie out of it! (See My School 6 Production Details for more information.) The ending was somewhat weak, because we were saving the true ending for My School 6. We instead had Virgil waking up, wondering if everthing which happened so far was a dream.

The production tools we had were entirely different. Unlike the first four My School movies, we could shoot the scenes in any order we desired. We could also have multiple takes of scenes, and a choice of different angles. We rented a Sony 8mm handicam, which were just invented. Editing of the film was done at the Southern Alberta Institutue of Technology. I transferred what we had shot to 3/4" format and did the editing on the broadcast-quality machines. We could insert audio and video, allowing a more fluid pace. Cutting of action could be frame accurate. Voice could be put on one audio track and music on another. The music was especially strong, taken from a dozen or more other movie soundtracks. This new technology gave the My School series a much more professional look.