Class Of 1984

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B-     Extras: B+     Film: C+

 

 

They don't make them like Class of 1984 (1982) anymore.  And thank God.  Oh, sure, there are movies as equally derivative as Class of 1984 is, but few films wallow in its own fetishistic violence and dime-store moral-thumping as unabashedly as this film does.

 

From the outset, viewers will notice glaring similarities to not only pictures like Blackboard Jungle, but also those Hell's Highway driving instruction films shown in schools.  It's with that latter homage where director Mark Lester begins his unmitigated assault on the viewer with his Obvious Stick.  Because, in case watching the first five minutes of the film, in which rapscallions in rival gangs own the schools, pass through metal detectors to get into school buildings, and force teachers to bring guns to class, wasn't enough to alert viewers that things aren't all peachy keen in schools in the early '80s, the film offers the following prologue:

"Last year there were 280,000 incidents of violence by students against their teachers and classmates in our high schools.

 

Unfortunately, this film is partially based on true events.

 

Fortunately, very few schools are like Lincoln High… yet."

 

What's unfortunate is that this marginal cult film, set up with this preposterous opening, could have parlayed that into a schlock tale of youth run amok truly deserving of cult status.  That is, if Roger Corman had made the film.  Instead, viewers are dumped into this A Clockwork Orange rip-off, post-pre-apocalyptic wasteland where everyone is taking matters just a little too seriously.  Problems in schools?  No doubt.  But to the degree that Lester portrays in Class of 1984, with new music teacher Perry King (Andrew Norris) and science vet Terry Corrigan (Roddy McDowall), on the wrong side of Peter Stegman's (Timothy Van Patten) gang of chained, pierced punk rockers, getting terrorized by Stegman and his cronies both inside and out of school?  Dubious at best.

 

In the 20-minute Blood and Blackboards, incorporated on Anchor Bay's new DVD of Class of 1984, Lester claims to have witnessed shocking images and moments at his old high school in the inner city of what he seems to categorize as Anytown, USA.  That, coupled with news stories about school violence and teachers being attacked in schools, led him to make the film as a serious cautionary tale about what the future might hold.  He then laments that, in the wake of Columbine, which happened 15 years later in a very different social climate, people didn't heed his warning.

 

Perhaps someone should confiscate his Obvious Stick and replace it with a Reality one.  School violence, while existent to varying degrees in America since post-World War II (hence Blackboard Jungle), is often exacerbated in the news and by authority figures to lend credence to their claims that the moral fortitude of America's youth is not simply waning but on the verge of extinction.  Of all the news stories that appeared across the country in 1980 and 1981, when Lester first had the germ of the idea for Class of 1984, how many of them were about school violence?  Hard to say without doing the research, but I'd venture to guess less than one percent.  Talk about promoting a culture a fear.

 

But the worst part seems to be that Lester isn't even fearful of school violence so much as the cultural conditions that create it.  Stegman and his gang are punk rockers in every sense.  They are the epitome of evil in Lester's world, with the punk rock/slam dance venue his characters go to acting like a lightning rod for violence, malignancy, and death.  But then he has Alice Cooper do the movie's theme song, "I Am the Future."  What an interesting turnabout.  Prior to this, rock and roll was the enemy.  Here, it's given an almost safe quality -- rock is the good old days -- while punk, the evolution of Alice Cooper's style of r 'n' r, is demonized as the creator of social ill.

 

What results, then, is a film more about the idea of the dangers of school violence than the honest-to-god warning movie about school violence itself that Lester seems to think he's made.  It certainly doesn't help that Lester himself can't keep his filming styles straight.  What begins as a Blood on the Highway-style shock film becomes a fourth-generation copy of A Clockwork Orange, then, with the introduction of the character of Arthur (Michael J. Fox) and his dilemma of ratting out Stegman for selling bad coke to his buddy which causes him to commit suicide, becomes a poor after-school special, then becomes a hollow, exploitative rip-off of Straw Dogs after King's wife is brutally raped by Stegman and his three followers in a scene of violence that would make Sam Peckinpah himself squirm.

 

Or maybe he would have enjoyed the film; who knows.  Class of 1984 isn't misogynistic as much as it is misanthropic.  Lester seems to have a very bleak view of the world and the humans populating it, especially the youngsters.  This comes through not only in the making-of featurette Blood and Blackboards on the film's DVD, but also the audio commentary and the film's screenplay, which is accessible as a DVD-ROM extra on the disc.  He also seems to be very annoyed that people haven't paid more attention to the important lessons he brought to bear in the film.  This, frankly, is nonsense -- look at how many other filmmakers have followed in his footsteps by borrowing judiciously from various films to piece together their own Frankenstein's Monster movie creations.

 

Other extras include audio commentary with Director Mark Lester, the original theatrical trailer, 2 TV Spots, Poster & Still Gallery and text bio of Lester.  This DVD, though, should bring Lester some amount of vindication.  These extras allow him to proselytize and berate viewers about his important message, and Anchor Bay's clean up of the film gives viewers the chance to watch the film with some very good elements.  The 1.77 x 1 anamorphic widescreen presentation is fairly clean, given the film's age and reputation, and the 5.1 Dolby Digital and 2.0 Dolby Surround mixes, while not the most spectacular ever committed to disc, get the job done as we say.

 

And most importantly, this DVD will make the film more accessible than it has ever been before, and to even wider audiences.  Just keep it out of schools -- you never know what kind of punk-rock-influenced kid might get his grubby mitts on it.

 

 

-   Dante A. Ciampaglia