CLASS OF 1999
A review in the public domain
by The Phantom
(baumgart@esquire.dpw.com)
Though the Phantom usually apologizes for taking longer than a few days in getting his reviews to his phans, in this case no apology is really needed, since the Phantom, in a departure from his usual verbose style, is going to advise his phans up front to sit out Mark Lester's somewhat entertaining but rather lame sequel to his 1982 cult favorite, CLASS OF 1984, or at least wait for its Blockbusters debut in a few months. (Now imagine that sentence had the Phantom *not* departed from his usual verbose style.)
For those phans not familiar with Lester's earlier work, CLASS OF 1984 was intended to be an updating of the schoolroom chaos classic THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE. The idea was much the same -- a naive teacher comes to a troubled inner city school and is forced to contend with a gang of thugs who do everything they can to discourage him from teaching. Sadly, BLACKBOARD JUNGLE seems fairly tame and dated by our contemporary standards, and it is no doubt for this reason that Lester went to great lengths to make things in CLASS OF 1984 just a little more outrageous than the reality of even the most troubled school. Yes, many city schools now force students to submit to metal detectors, but at least there aren't many yet where teachers are threatened with axes, or where students are pushed into buzz saws, or where teachers go berserk and teach their biology classes at gunpoint. At least not yet (though had someone suggested the possibility of teaching at gunpoint to a certain frustrated high school chemistry teacher the Phantom remembers, chances are the teacher would at least have raised the possibility with the school board and teachers' union).
CLASS OF 1984 wasn't a great film, but it was a lot of fun. One reason for its success is the shear obviousness of its plot. It's something so familiar and comfortable to us -- we know just how the entire film will progress, we know that there won't be any unpleasant and surprising plot twists, and we know that if we decide to watch our microwave popcorn for the whole four minutes, we really won't miss that much. We've seen it all before, but while obviousness is a serious drawback in other genres, it is sometimes a distinct plus when it comes to horror films. Why else do we so eagerly await each of Freddy, Michael, and Jason's new installments? Of course we know that the teacher will win out in the end, and of course we know that all those awful students will get just what they deserve before the credits roll. To be fair, Timothy Van Patten also had a lot to do with CLASS OF 1984's success: his over-the-top performance as a combination sociopath and accomplished but frustrated pianist added a spark of life (and more than a little camp) to what otherwise might have been an ordinary, run-of-the-mill revenge film. And seeing Michael "I haven't added the 'J' yet" Fox play a frightened freshmen is alone worth the price of admission; his incredibly melodramatic "performance" in this cheap exploitation flick is likely to be a little further back to the future than he would care to remember at this point in his career.
Lester's latest, CLASS OF 1999, isn't exactly a sequel, since all the bad guys get theirs at the end of CLASS OF 1984; instead, it's more like a spinoff. And in this season of high concept horror films, CLASS OF 1999 is no exception. The high concept pitch? "OK, imagine ROBOCOP meets THE TERMINATOR, but with teachers, not cops. Things get so bad in the schools they have to hire androids to teach, but they lose control of them and..." The Phantom was disappointed that the print ads didn't feature an original slogan like "Meet the future of classroom instruction," though perhaps the fear of litigation stifled the producers' creative impulses.
But like many high concept films, CLASS OF 1999 suffers from a distinct lack focus. It starts in the same vein as ROBOCOP, complete with a bleak vision of the future, a future where most schools are declared free-fire zones, students are asked to check their automatic weapons at the door (to be picked up after school ends), and the government agency charged with educating our nation's youth is the Department of Educational Defense. The joke here is that the students have made it so difficult for average teachers (i.e., human teachers) to teach that the Department and the school board of a beleaguered Seattle school resort to extreme measures: they decide to try using experimental androids to teach classes and restore order in the school. Since the androids look human enough (well, human enough to pass for teachers, anyway), the students don't realize what's happening until it's too late.
Had Lester stuck with this theme (as Paul Verhoeven did with ROBOCOP), he might have had something here; alas, Lester is no Verhoeven. Instead, he chickens out and turns CLASS OF 1999 into a TERMINATOR clone about half way through. Unfortunately, although both ROBOCOP and THE TERMINATOR deal with future technology and specifically with androids and how they interact with people, they're fundamentally different films. It would have made no sense for Peter Weller to suddenly lose his mind and start killing innocent people, just as it would have made no sense for Schwarzenegger (had to look that one up, phans -- the Phantom can never remember how many Z's go on the marquee) to fall in love; to their credit, neither Verhoeven nor Cameron stray from the single point of focus in their respective films -- that's what makes them great directors. Lester, however, is basically a hack, and he makes the mistake of assuming that if one idea is good, then two are even better (the Phantom hereby dubs this "THE FIRST POWER syndrome," in honor of one of the silliest and most overplotted horror films in recent memory).
There was an echo of CLASS OF 1999 in CLASS OF 1984, when toward the end Malcolm McDowell, who played a burnt-out and hard-drinking biology teacher, finally cracks after Timothy Van Patten and pals kill his laboratory animals (and specifically put his favorite lab rabbit on a rotisserie, FATAL ATTRACTION-style). McDowell is found holding a gun on his biology class, forcing them to learn or die.
Without a doubt, there is something undeniably funny about a biology teacher holding a .32 to a student's head and asking her how many chambers the human heart has -- "Come on now, you know this! It's very important that you try to remember..." But instead of expanding on this idea (furthering the already outrageous joke by making the teachers inhuman robots), Lester decides to go the TERMINATOR route and turn CLASS OF 1999 into a bad remake of that hunt-and-destroy classic. The teachers, you see, are really army-surplus, and the unscrupulous head of MegaTech (played by Stacy Keach with a white mane of hair and Star Trek-style contacts in his eyes) knows that with a little reprogramming he can pass them off as fully certified classroom instruction units. But Keach has a hidden agenda: he knows that once the "teachers" get a taste of corporal punishment, they'll begin to revert back to their original purpose, and he finally be able to prove to the army how effective they are in combat.
That's really much too much story for such a simple-minded film, and though there are dozens of great scenes and lots of great ideas scattered through, CLASS OF 1999 just can't support all that plot. Instead, it winds up as another candidate for our ever-expanding "half-film festival." Lester would have been better advised to stick to the successful formula of CLASS OF 1984 -- the kind of formula that makes Troma films (like the TOXIC AVENGER series) so enjoyable -- rather than try to take a stab at creating a fully realized future world that's part ROAD WARRIOR, part ROBOCOP, part TERMINATOR, but only partly successful.
Still, how can you not enjoy seeing an android teacher approach an unruly student and go through a menu of possible responses in his heads-up display [ (1) educate, (2) reprimand, (3) discipline ]? And how can you help but enjoy the little throwaway touches throughout the film (like the Orwellian electronic signs in the school, urging the students to "LEARN" and "OBEY")? And to the film's credit, the creature and robot effects are quite good -- at least as good as the effects in the similarly budgeted TERMINATOR.
But in the end, all the individual parts just don't add up to one coherent whole. Every time we think that Lester has finally found his voice, he pulls the rug out from under us and changes the tone of the film once again (usually for the worse). By the film's end, we're just biding our time until the teachers can all be exterminated by the rival gangs of students (who have, in a wonderful moment of classic film cliche, shook hands and joined to fight their common enemy). And we do this only because Lester holds out the promise of a TERMINATOR-style ending -- one promise that he does, in fact, deliver on.
With ROBOCOP 2 and TOTAL RECALL arriving in the theaters shortly, there's not much point in seeing CLASS OF 1999; in just a few weeks, it'll all be done better, with better special effects, with higher budgets, and with tee-shirts and Burger King glasses galore. But CLASS OF 1999 is worth seeing once the hoopla of the summer's releases fade and fall is once again upon us.
On the bright side, remember that it did take Lester eight years to bring forth this sub-par sequel to his cultish CLASS OF 1984; if he keeps to this pace, the Phantom won't have to review CLASS OF 2001 (complete with gorillas, space stations, and a tall, black chalkboard that hums) for a good long time.
: The Phantom
: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com
: {cmcl2,uunet}!esquire!baumgart
.
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