THE FACULTY
If you liked The Thing and The Breakfast Club...
I wasn't sure what to expect from this one. Reviews have been all over the map, from vociferous panning to positively glowing, and the ad campaign is one of the worst that I've seen in a while (even moreso now that I've seen the film - more on that later). But I completely enjoyed this movie, in almost every department.
Take all five members of The Breakfast Club, jack up Judd Nelson's IQ by about a hundred points and give him a drug lab, add a sweet blonde chick from Atlanta, and then plop down The Thing in their high school. As deriviative as it sounds (and often, it steals entire scenes and effects, though not without Rodriguez and Williamson adding some funky touches of their own), it all comes out as an exciting, funny, sometimes creepy, and always fun flick.
I missed the first ten minutes of this one, so somebody's gonna have to mail me and fill me in on what happened. (I came in just when the blonde chick was being introduced)
Anyway...it's business as usual at school, except the coach, and two teachers (well, maybe Piper Laurie's the assistant principal, I don't know) are drinking waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much water and acting kinda funny. Next thing you know, they're calling individual students down to the office and asking you all to write out your entire family tree and where everybody lives. (this scene just cracked me up. Actually, a lot of scenes cracked me up while the rest of the audience just didn't seem to get it, even though they largely enjoyed the film) As you might imagine, it's those six students that notice that something off-kilter is happening. Especially when one of them finds a brand-new lifeform just outside the school which reanimates from hibernation when it gets wet and replicates and grows long tendrils and....I've said too much.
The six youths are all quite good in their respective roles, and the adults (all menacing or potentially menacing) are all great as well, especially Robert Patrick as the football coach who's enjoying his job a little too much, it seems. Famke Janssen and Salma Hayek play waaay against type as two frumpy (!) faculty members.
The effects are very good, and entertaining enough even when they're not quite convincing. There's not much gore to speak of, so the film's R rating was mostly achieved, apparently, by the drug use.
And here we get to the movie's more questionable aspects. Remember the blood test in The Thing? Well, here, they steal that whole scene, but you have to snort a diarrhetic narcotic that this guy makes at home (called scat - I have absolutely no idea if this is a real drug), which basically dehydrates the aliens. Yes, it's a ripoff, but in The Thing, everybody was tied down. Here, everybody's getting high and laughing their asses off, trading a gun around and pointing it at each other even when there's no need for it (after forcing a guy at gunpoint to snort the scat, what point is there in giving him the gun to force you at gunpoint to snort it? Think about it...). It's a pretty weird, hairy little scene as everybody loses control to do anything about it when the infected one finally shows itself.
There's a very 60's kind of mentality at work there, too - that your willingness to take drugs means you're down with the real people, and if you won't, then you're with The Man. This might be offensive to some, but I found it even more amusing.
And maybe it's worrisome that this movie features students shooting and stabbing etc etc etc their teachers, even if they are aliens. Again, this just served to amuse me. (and let's face it, the foxy women left and right is a bonus)
My only real problem here is the overabundance of pop culture references. The students deduce the nature of the invading organism by their knowledge of sci-fi books - I mean, c'mon. It's not like the alien read those books and thought "Yeah, that's how I'll do it." Yes, Williamson, you're hip, now write the damn movie.
One more question - the relationship between the brilliant numbskull (the guy with the drug lab) and Famke Janssen, playing an English teacher, is completely lost on me. I don't get it. Maybe that was in the first ten minutes. Anyone care to fill me in? Because it seems like they're sleeping together, or once were, or want to, or...I have no idea.
And for once, the climax is genuinely climactic. Most movies like this wind down in their third act. Glad to see that this one didn't - even if it did kind of steal a page from Primal Rage, which I recently looked at.
The second-best film of the teen-horror revival, right behind Scream. (it supplants the hilarious Bride Of Chucky) Definitely, check it out.
Oh yeah, I forgot, that one thing about the ad campaign. It kind of disheartens me when there's such shameless pandering to demographics like there is on the poster for this film. Yes, it shows six youths - but only five of them are from the central six. The sixth is a black guy, who replaces the jock guy, who's the real sixth member. This black guy is in something like three scenes, and in every one he's completely disposable. I don't think I've ever seen a minority character so completely token - I mean, most token minorities don't have to be minorities, but they serve some function in the story. This guy serves no function at all, except to put a minority on the poster. Doesn't this kind of depress anybody else?