CLASS OF 1984 (1982) - ***1/2



The new music teacher (Perry King) at Lincoln High School should have known something was wrong and quit immediately after seeing fellow colleague Roddy McDowall at the parking lot carry a gun in his briefcase, and not even bother to hide that fact in broad daylight.

Watching the nicely-produced Anchor Bay DVD, you'll get a kick out of director Mark L. Lester making a big deal over and over of how CLASS OF 1984 "foresaw" shocking violence at America's educational institutions like Columbine, which is incredibly silly. Last I checked, Columbine was committed by two bullied guys with psychological problems who spent way too much time playing DOOM and illegally straw purchased their firearms with help from a friend, and not by a mafia-clique of mascara-wearing punks. That said, I'll give Lester credit in that it was science fiction to many back in 1982 to have metal detectors, security guards, and surveillance cameras at our high schools, and yet alot of my generation probably now take such measures for granted.

Early on, CLASS OF 1984 looked like it was gonna be a The Clash-inspired retake on BLACKBOARD JUNGLE (though I doubt that left-winger rock act would have liked being role models for such gangsters), where a well-meaning middle class teacher goes into an inner-city school run not by the faculty but by the students themselves, and as King pushes to do his job and regain law & order, the leader (Timothy Van Patten) pushes back harder. Nothing really exciting here, real bland melodrama and we even get some incredibly contrived cartoonish sillyness when this movie goes like so many movies from the 1970s and 80s where the administrators refuse to punish the kids and the law due to those damn civil liberties this side of DIRTY HARRY. Plus, Michael J. Fox (in an early role) is so annoying and whiney as a trumpet loser, you're sorta glad that he got knifed in the cafeteria.

But the surprising and shocking thing about CLASS OF 1984 is that for a low-budget trashy capitalization of then-newspaper headlines, it actually improves as the brutal violence and sheer insanity escalate until it becomes a satisfying and even memorable delivery of B-action exploitation cinema. When those punks throw stage blood at King, it's goofy and yet it's a sly blunt indication of the carnage to come.

I mean you have a kid tripping out after snorting some cocaine go climb up a flag pole and sing the Pledge of Allegiance before falling to his death. Then King grabs Van Patten in the bathroom with the intention of beating him into a bloody pulp for that dead kid, and when he can't do it, Van Patten mocks him. Then he promptly smashes his own head against a mirror, the wall, and sink, and gets King arrested for "assaulting a student." Speaking of which, I wonder what if Lester had scripted the scene differently, where King then afterwards took credit himself for the thrashing, and thus have Van Patten's psychological warfare horribly backfire, as the school makes fun of "the boss" getting wrecked by a pacifist liberal.

What I thought was really intriging with Van Patten was that after the movie's narrative rhythmn had been established, when he tries to play mindgames with King again in his classroom, he then busts out a beautiful and touching piano piece out of friggin nowhere, a total contrast to his rough and ruthless persona. It's such a surprisingly gifted touch to such familar formulaic genre ground, and even display a person's potential squandered on egomania and hooliganism, and also warn of his literal destructive creativity.

Anyway, CLASS at this point becomes A CLOCKWORK ORANGE meets THE GODFATHER, where Van Patten is good at being an asshole villain who grins at using the law and his super-intelligence to get away with everything, forever self-admiring himself. Though to be honest, Van Patten has one thing over Malcolm McDowall's Alex DeLarge, which is that instead of being a whore Beethoeven, at least he created his own music. There is even a scene where much reminiscent (i.e. derivative) of Coppola's film where Van Patten meets at a nasty rotting night club and deals narcotic transactions, recruit gang muscle, and make would-be coke whores go through "try outs" to join his prostitution ring. Then we see him at his home, and you'll go "that figures."

How many high school movies you know of where the destiny of everyone and their fates belong to that a guy who if busted could be only tried as a juvenile?

Really folks, there are so many moments where you will say simply Damn to it, even if you have to sit through some inadverted cheesyness that was Lester's fault, like when Van Patten says seriously clunker lines like "Life....is Pain!" and "I am the Future!" (Who wrote this dialogue, Sylvester Stallone?) For example, when the brood retaliates at McDowall by turning his animal laboratory into a gory butcher shop. Then McDowall's response, in the best awesomely bizarro sequence in CLASS OF 1984, when he has a total nervous breakdown from the slaughter and nobody in his biology classes giving a damn about what he's trying to teach, he holds the students hostage at gunpoint. If anything, these pukes had been going through their rampage motions like a game, and yet now in their eyes they realize that the safety net aint there for them afterwards.

There is something perverse about us enjoying McDowall's threats to blow their brains out if they answer a question wrongly, and yet a total swerve from what you expect when he's like happy that they actually remember his lectures, even if these are the same assholes who skinned his rabbits alive. Speaking of which, thank God I was an "A" student in high school biology. Mathematics though, I would have been fucked in McDowall's classroom.

With the finale when Van Patten's army gangrapes King's pregnant wife and take polaroid snap shots, which they show to King before his major school recital, and he gives the look. According to self-stylized badass cinema afficionado The Outlaw Vern, he defines the the look as one essential in most such revenge movies from WALKING TALL to KILL BILL, where the wronged hero tells us without talking that we're going beyond the point of no return regarding his relations with the villains, which of course means they're gonna fucking die!

This is the strongest section of CLASS, where it becomes ultimately THE WARRIORS and STRAW DOGS mixed into a blender, spit on by Lester, and then thrown out the window for good measure. Really, I admit that King and Lester did make me buy why this guy at this point finally decides to kill those little bastards, and why we get everything from a bloody brawl around a powered-up sharp bandsaw to a nice human fireball at the garage to finally an operatic and climatic splatter confrontation on the school rooftop.

CLASS OF 1984 is pure junk, but it's really good junk. It could have been really idiotic and lousy, but instead prevails because of some good acting here and there, some adjustments to genre traditions, and the filmmakers never job out simply because of the material, yet not apologize for its direct visceral nature. You know, such a movie could only be produced before Columbine, because unless you're going for an arty "serious" angle like say ELEPHANT, I don't see anyone funding or willing to distribute such a flick these days.

So check it out, if only as a time capsule to both what some people probably seriously thought the future held for them, and for the shit you could get away with at the movies at that time.