...I'm gonna cut you, white meat!
I really like this film. A great exploitation piece from the early 80s, one of the great eras for trashy but 'fun' B-movies. The thing about the early 80s is that (in the UK, anyway) the Video Recordings Act had not yet been introduced. This meant that censorship was a great deal more lenient (if non-existent), and anyone could get a video of pretty much anything. Class of 1984 is still - inexplicably - banned in the UK, even WITH edits. I can't see that this is a valid decision, after trashy crap like The New York Ripper (Fulci, 1982) has been re-released by the VIPCO distributors.
Anyway, SPOILERS ahead as we look at the plot of this B-movie classic:
The place: Canada. The time: 1982. Mr. Andrew (Andy, to his friends) Norris is the new replacement at a rough school for Mr. Goldstein, a music teacher who "fell down some stairs". He could come back, but as the more cynical, gun-packing Biology teacher Mr. Corrigan says: "old teachers, just like athletes, don't come back." Mr. Norris inherits some nasty pupils, including Peter Stegman, a neo-Nazi piano-playing type who "runs the school" and sells drugs in the toilets at breaktime. His gang, who are equally tough, are pure anarchy in human form. They throw bits of paper in class and interupt the register with various witticisms and singing.
Out of school they are the local youth mafia, running 'tings in local punk clubs and terrorising the neighbourhood in their nice red car. Apparently "they ought to have a revolving door named after them", as one police representative comments, but his hands are tied and he can't do anything to stop the gang tormenting poor Mr. Norris by splashing paint at him, disrupting his lessons, shouting at him in an aggressive way, and... I won't go much further, but be warned: there is an unpleasant rape scene that detracts from the film as a whole. Up until then it is a comic book style action film with attitude to spare, but the inclusion of that sequence moves it into a different territory, something much more exploitative than it needed to be.
Other than that, this is great stuff - this film is cheesily brilliant. Perry King is a bit vacuous as Mr. Norris, but Michael J. Fox has an effective early role as Arthur, a swotty kid who gets stabbed, possibly for his awful one-liners. Roddy MacDowell is fantastic as Mr. Corrigan, drunkenly cooing at the soon-to-be-slaughtered animals in his lab, and Timothy Van Patten gives a scenery chewing performance as Stegman (and he wrote that piece of piano music himself, ladies and gentlemen).
Leroy's gang have a strange mixture of accents - listen carefully before the chain fight 'after school', and the leader of the gang has a very cockney accent. "No-wun messiz wiv moi man Leeroy!" This is getting more and more accurate every day, I think, especially with the amount of power that a) the 'kids' wield in the local community, and at school, and b) the police don't have when it comes to dealing with them.
Also, OFSTED (the UK's teacher inspectors) would probably object to Mr. Norris's way of dealing with disruptive pupils (smashing their heads open, lynching them, etc). Behavior like that in the UK would probably lead to disciplinary action: maybe some kind of paperwork shuffling activity or fruitless liaising with the parents of the children involved would be recommended.
Although this is hard to get in the UK (I picked my copy up at a car boot sale about 10 years ago), if you get the chance to see this then do - a simple, vigilante/exploitationer B-movie. It delivers the goods and plays like a live action comic book. Good work!
I really like this film. A great exploitation piece from the early 80s, one of the great eras for trashy but 'fun' B-movies. The thing about the early 80s is that (in the UK, anyway) the Video Recordings Act had not yet been introduced. This meant that censorship was a great deal more lenient (if non-existent), and anyone could get a video of pretty much anything. Class of 1984 is still - inexplicably - banned in the UK, even WITH edits. I can't see that this is a valid decision, after trashy crap like The New York Ripper (Fulci, 1982) has been re-released by the VIPCO distributors.
Anyway, SPOILERS ahead as we look at the plot of this B-movie classic:
The place: Canada. The time: 1982. Mr. Andrew (Andy, to his friends) Norris is the new replacement at a rough school for Mr. Goldstein, a music teacher who "fell down some stairs". He could come back, but as the more cynical, gun-packing Biology teacher Mr. Corrigan says: "old teachers, just like athletes, don't come back." Mr. Norris inherits some nasty pupils, including Peter Stegman, a neo-Nazi piano-playing type who "runs the school" and sells drugs in the toilets at breaktime. His gang, who are equally tough, are pure anarchy in human form. They throw bits of paper in class and interupt the register with various witticisms and singing.
Out of school they are the local youth mafia, running 'tings in local punk clubs and terrorising the neighbourhood in their nice red car. Apparently "they ought to have a revolving door named after them", as one police representative comments, but his hands are tied and he can't do anything to stop the gang tormenting poor Mr. Norris by splashing paint at him, disrupting his lessons, shouting at him in an aggressive way, and... I won't go much further, but be warned: there is an unpleasant rape scene that detracts from the film as a whole. Up until then it is a comic book style action film with attitude to spare, but the inclusion of that sequence moves it into a different territory, something much more exploitative than it needed to be.
Other than that, this is great stuff - this film is cheesily brilliant. Perry King is a bit vacuous as Mr. Norris, but Michael J. Fox has an effective early role as Arthur, a swotty kid who gets stabbed, possibly for his awful one-liners. Roddy MacDowell is fantastic as Mr. Corrigan, drunkenly cooing at the soon-to-be-slaughtered animals in his lab, and Timothy Van Patten gives a scenery chewing performance as Stegman (and he wrote that piece of piano music himself, ladies and gentlemen).
Leroy's gang have a strange mixture of accents - listen carefully before the chain fight 'after school', and the leader of the gang has a very cockney accent. "No-wun messiz wiv moi man Leeroy!" This is getting more and more accurate every day, I think, especially with the amount of power that a) the 'kids' wield in the local community, and at school, and b) the police don't have when it comes to dealing with them.
Also, OFSTED (the UK's teacher inspectors) would probably object to Mr. Norris's way of dealing with disruptive pupils (smashing their heads open, lynching them, etc). Behavior like that in the UK would probably lead to disciplinary action: maybe some kind of paperwork shuffling activity or fruitless liaising with the parents of the children involved would be recommended.
Although this is hard to get in the UK (I picked my copy up at a car boot sale about 10 years ago), if you get the chance to see this then do - a simple, vigilante/exploitationer B-movie. It delivers the goods and plays like a live action comic book. Good work!