Sometimes one sees a film that's so powerful, so moving that it transends the cinematic experience. The movie shakes your very existance, changing long-standing beliefs and sending you home knowing that you've forever been changed by a filmmakers' masgnus opus.
None of the films I saw this past weekend even come close to this. But damn if I didn't have a great time.
The Silent Movie Theatre kicked things off Friday with the first double feature in their High School Hell series. One of the many very cool things Hadrian, the ringleader of this cinematic circus, does is run several concurrent series at a time, each occupying a different slot in the weekly lineup. Foe example, each Friday matinee this month is showing psychadelic Italian filnms, while the late-night Friday fare features strange films set in high school.
CLASS OF 1984 was up first, and I vaugely remembered seeing this film on cable as a kid when, I realize in hindsight, that I was far too young to realize what a craptacular movie this is. A pre-credit card warns us that although high-school violence is on the riseat an alarming rate, there aren't any schools like the film's setting, Chicago's Lincoln High School...
...
...wait for it...
...
...YET!
One of the guys from the '80s detective show Riptide, which I only remember because my dad used to watch it and it featured a pink helicopter, is a music teacher who transfers into an inner city high school where the kids are pretty much free to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year dealing drugs, running prostitution rackets and shaking down the large heard of dorks that roam the hallways like African antelope waiting to be fed upon by hungry lions.
Micheal J. Fox proves that you do indeed gotta start somewhere by playing one of the band geeks who is terrorized by the ruthless Steadman and his gang of punks, who seem to occupy the alpha dog slot in the school's heirarchy of organized crime. Roddy McDowall has the film's best scene when he realizes his dream of helping his worthles students the value of education. Since traditional methods haven't worked, Roddy snaps, holds Biology class at gunpoint and promises consequences far worse than summer school for each wrong answer they give.
He inadvertantly snags the movie's second biggest laugh when he attempts vehiclular homicide only to run into another car at 30 mph, which somehow launches his car, rolls it onto its roof and then causes it to explode. Guess dude was carrying a trunk fulla C-4 or something.
The movie would've worked as a laughable guilty pleasure save for an unpleasant scene at the end where Steadman and his gang strike out at Professor Riptide by breaking into his home and kidnapping his pregnant wife...Who just happens to be home alone with the windows open despite the fact that Steadman had recently done a drive-by on their home with a paint gun so everyone involved knows the bad guys have the Riptides' home address. But I digress...
Rape is only implied, and the scene is very long, but the unpleasantness is still a little too real for a ridiculous, laughable film like this. The mood was killed, just as the film was reaching its epic conclusion as Riptide snuffs Steadman's gang one by one in the wood shop, auto shop, the gym and the roof of the auditorium where the band geeks, who've been raised up from nothing by Professor Riptide, are giving their year-end recital with a chance to impress school board officials and possibly get invited to the state competition. Think it's concidence that Riptide and Steadman are settling their differences right next to a skylight directly above the stage the band is playing on? Riiiight.
CLASS OF 1984's "sequel", CLASS OF 1999, followed and was much more enjoyable. Director Mark Lester, who not only brought us CLASS OF 1984 but also the Governator's homo-erotic masterpiece COMMANDO, learned from his mistakes on the first CLASS OF film and went freakin' nuts on its followup.
In a future so wrought with school violence that the police have given up and sequestered the areas around schools, turing them into lawless "Free Fire Zones" that resemble sets left over from The Road Warrior, a school in Seattle have resorted to robotic teachers who have been converted from their original military application to lay down the law in the classroom.
Believe it or not, it's even more ridiculous than it sounds, and it was brilliant!
A bleached-platinum-blonde, ice-blue contact-lens wearing Stacy Keach is the mastermind behind the school's new disciplinary policy. Not content to phone it in, ponder where his career went wrong and spend his per diem on mini-bar booze, Keach goes ballistic with his role and sets the tone for the film. The biggest laughs come from Keach's non-speaking additions, like the way he holds a banana during a stand-off with Malcom McDowell, who plays the school's hapless principal, and how he chugs a glass of milk in a fancy restaurant.
McDowell, on the other hand, definitely phones it in and quite visibly wonders where his career went wrong as the school's hapless principal. Fortunately, he meets his end midway through CLASS OF 1999 so he can't serve as a buzzkill during the film's epic conclusion.
The delinquents finally strike back against their robotic oppressors, who try to restore order via weapons concealed under their human-looking facades. As we all know, the only thing better than a character with a weapon in place of a limb are three freakin' characters with limbs in place of limbs!
Pam Grier + flamethrower arm = GENIUS!
Saturday night at The New Beverly Cinema brought the semi-regular midnight movie. This week was a double-dose of awesome, as midnight-movie guru Phil celebrated his 30th birthday with a free showing of the '80s aerobics epic HEAVENLY BODIES.
HEAVENLY BODIES was a special film for several reasons. For starters, a scene very early in the film shows plucky aerobics black-belt Sam(antha) drumming up business for her new aerobics studio near a poster of FLASHDANCE.
Now, quickee, exploitation rip-offs of hugely successful films were nothing special in the '80s. In fact, Cannon Films made a fortune and kept my VCR busy as a child with a massive library of such movies. But if memory serves me correctly, HEAVENLY BODIES may be the first to openly acknowledge the film it's ripping off by featuring a poster of its source in the first five minutes. It also means they wrote, produced, and cast the film quickly enough to start filming while the movie they ripped off was still in the theaters. Such an impressive feat becomes obvious once HEAVENLY BODIES starts to roll and you realize they cut corners on trivial things like plot and dialogue.
Don't misunderstand me here. I'm not saying the plot and dialogue are lame, I'm saying they're non-freakin'-existant. The painfully cute Cynthia Dale easily spends 90% of the films' running time leading tightly choreographed aerobics routines and expressing her emotions by spontaneously breaking out into dance.
When the big gym across town tries to crush Sam's aerobics studio, she suggests they settle their differences in the time-honored tradition of team aerobics.
Yeah, seriously.
HEAVENLY BODIES is perfect midnight-movie fodder, and one of the better times I had at the New Beverly Midnights, which is really saying something. The crowd was hot (Despite several drunk chicks sitting to the far left who may have been the unfunniest people I've ever heard open their traps), and the atmosphere was intensified by Phil's request that people show up in legwarmers and spandex. Nice.
High culture? No, definitely not. But the weekend did feature a couple epic guilty pleasures, and HEAVENLY BODIES will be a hard midnight film to top.
Wait, did I just read that NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE is playing at the Bev in a couple weeks? Kids, we may have a new number one...
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