Class of 1984 (

1982

) ½

When I was watching Blackboard Jungle (1955), I was left with the distinct impression that somewhere, underneath the stodginess and constant lecturing about the importance of education, there was the seed of a twisted exploitation film. A film that I'd rather be watching instead of the dusty mid-century morality play that was unfolding in front of me. Evidentially, I was not the only one because nearly 30 years after the original release of Blackboard Jungle (1955), director Mark Lester decided to produce an unofficial remake loaded to the gills with sex, violence, and punk rock. It even goes so far as to mimic the original opening text crawl, though this time rather than just assure us that most American schools are not like this hell hole, it warns that perhaps this will not be the case for long! From there it's off to meet new teacher, Andrew Norris, who has been called in from Nebraska to teach at Abraham Lincoln High School in some unspecified inner city wasteland. Just like his predecessor, Richard Dadier, Norris has a pregnant young wife (though I have my doubt about how authentic this pregnancy is, because the film takes place over what looks like an entire semester, and she's no more visibly pregnant at the end than she is at the start). He starts with the best of intentions but, he's about to discover that good intentions don't count for shit in a modern American public school. Before long he's caught up in a steadily deepening conflict with Peter Stegman, the leader of a punk gang who dresses, talks, and acts like James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (1955). While all the story beats are a direct copy then from Blackboard Jungle (1955), what's different is the attitude. There are no lectures about how great the American education system is on average, no high-minded platitudes about how important education is to a young mind, and no punches pulled. Instead, we have a violent, sexually depraved, drug-induced anarchy where the most moral thing a teacher can do is hunt down and murder five of his students.

The first thing the audience needs to do is get familiar to the world of Lincoln High School and its surrounding environs. Is the school, much like Blackboard Jungle's North Manual Trades High School, a place where most of the students are good at heart despite being rough around the edges and only a few of the pupils are genuine menaces? Or is it a hive of scum and villainy so wretched that the best thing to do would burn the whole building down, preferably with its students still locked inside. Class of 1984 tries to have it both ways. In the establishing scenes of the film we're treated to wanton lawlessness and criminality on the part of the school's students, drugs violence, sex, and petty mischief abound in the halls of Lincoln High. Practically every other student is trying to sneak a switchblade through the metal detectors posted at every entrance, and when one of the teachers sees one get by he shrugs and continues on his way. After all, what's one knife more or less, it's hardly enough to make an appreciable difference in the wild west of the school hallways. Besides, he only feels comfortable teaching with after a stiff drink and with the knowledge that there's a handgun tucked away in his briefcase, so who the hell is he to pass judgment on the kids who might want similar protection. Indeed, the school is only able to operate thanks to a disproportionate security budget, a small army of armed guards, and a nearly universal surveillance network run out of the principal's office. Even then, the school can't even stop students from vandalizing Norris' car when it's locked up in the faculty parking lot. However, this picture of universal ruin is interrupted somewhat as the plot begins to center around the conflict between Norris and Stegman. As a necessity of the plot, all the evil of Lincoln High School is concentrated into Stegman and his four cronies: Patsy, Barnyard, Drugstore, and Rejack. During the film's final act, we see so little delinquency that doesn't involve these four punks that you'd be forgiven for thinking that without these kids the school would be a veritable paradise.

To be fair, Stegman and his gang are, ironically enough, overachievers in the field of delinquency. They do the usual high school gang stuff, disrupting class, roughing up their rival gangs and peddling drugs in the school's bathrooms, but additionally, some of their crimes start to reach absurd levels of sophistication and cruelty. Take for instance, the prostitution ring that Setgman runs after school where young women whore themselves out in exchange for coke. This is the kind of enterprise that should be well beyond the organizational abilities of a high school student, no matter how gifted. At the very least it begs the question, how the hell does Stegman keep rival (presumably adult-run) crime syndicates from muscling in on his business? Is he part of some underworld internship program or does he just have connections with more powerful figures? Surely the four goons he surrounds himself are unable to deter the hired muscle of a real criminal organization. None of this is explored, which makes the whole character and premise of Stegman and his gang immediately absurd. Said absurdity is no knock against Class of 1984, which is operating more on the logic of exploitation film than PSA and absurdity is no disadvantage when it comes to the lewd and sleazy. The whole prostitution business also gives us another chance to see some naked women and also showcase the peculiar kinks of Patsy, the gang's sole female member. When presented with a new girl who wants to go to work for them, all the male members of the group are ready to just rubber-stamp her and send her out onto the street but Patsy insists on examining her first. She makes the girl strip down and then argues that one of the guys should try her out before letting her get to work, after all, if they don't maintain standards among their coke whores who will take their business seriously? Once the guys accede to her suggestions Patsy insists on watching the act for herself. Before this scene, I had assumed that Patsy was Stegman's girlfriend, and only along for the ride because of the reflected glory of sleeping with the gang-leader, but after this, she starts to come across more like a sadistic lesbian, plainly excited by the degradation and humiliation of other women. It makes her quite a frightening figure, especially when compared to the other grunts in the gang who are just a bunch of stupid, drug-addicted, louts.

As a teenage crime-lord, Stegman is on the surface an utterly ridiculous figure, but rather than just leaving it at that Class of 1984 gives us additional information that makes him more absurd and unpalatable. Stegman is not just some ordinary hoodlum, he's from a rich family and only attending Lincoln High School because his behavioral record means that no other school, private or public, in the surrounding district would even think about taking him on as a student. His home life doesn't look that bad either, sure he's growing up in a single-parent home but his mom seems like she loves him well-enough and while maybe she spoils him a bit, it's hardly outside the realm of normal parental affection. Indeed, there doesn't seem to be anything really wrong with his domestic life. To top it all off, Stegman is a child prodigy that can play the piano better than anyone in Norris' orchestra without even bothering to practice. He's the kind of kid, that if he applied himself even slightly to his school work, would be able to take home a report card loaded with As and Bs. His family would have no trouble paying his college tuition, and it's not difficult to see him succeed in whatever field he chose to pursue. All this goes some way towards explaining why Stegman is such an effective criminal (the skills needed for criminal success are also those needed for business success, plus a willingness to commit acts of violence when necessary), but it makes us wonder why the hell Stegman is even bothering to become a criminal in the first place. He's not some disenfranchised kid who has no other options open to him, like a lot of the other hoodlums in the school, but rather a young man with all the opportunities in the world laid his feet. That he tosses aside those opportunities with scarcely a second thought, and opts instead to murder, pimp, and sell dope for kicks makes him an almost comical figure, devoted to doing evil simply for the sake of doing evil. This all serves a purpose, after all this a film where we are supposed to root for a teacher as he kills his students. If we feel any sympathy at all for Stegman then we're going to be conflicted when Norris gives him the full Suspiria (1977) treatment in their final confrontation. To function as a pulp action movie, Stegman has to be a ridiculous figure, and boy does this film ever deliver on that.

Viewers under the age of 40, will probably be somewhat perplexed by the way that Stegman and his gang are depicted as listening to punk rock. Modern punk rock is either creatively bankrupt drivel, churned out by massive companies to profit off of teenage rebellion, or progressive wank that insists that punk always was and always will be about creating safe spaces and protecting its fans from any offensive opinions. With such examples to go by, we can forgive the young folk of today for thinking that punks were always such spineless wimps making toothless music. However punk music in the 70s and 80s was often about being as deliberately offensive as possible, and blindly lashing out at any form of authority everywhere. Barnyard, for instance, does not wear a swastika because he believes in fascist ideology or even because he's given much thought to the history of the symbol or what it represents. All he and other punks from this vintage, care about is the symbol's ability to offend. He knows that wearing it is likely to piss somebody off, so he wears it for the sheer delight of enraging them. The swastika here is much the same for these punks as it was for the 4chan shit-posters of my youth: a tool with which to shock and offend respectable society, rather than a confession of earnest white supremacist ideology.

The police in this film must have been borrowed from one of Death Wish's knock offs because they are useless at dealing with the criminal students. Stegman's long history of rape, assault, drug-dealing, and assorted other crimes are all kept in a sealed file and apparently, he can't even be investigated on any of it, let alone arrested. Stegman can go so far as to set off a firebomb in Norris' car without fearing any repercussions from the cops. All that's missing is the chief inspector letting out a wistful “boys will be boys” as Stegman caves a deadbeat junkie's face in with a tire iron right before his eyes. Were this a more serious movie, I would assume that it was making some point about the judicial system's leniency with regards to crimes committed by wayward teens, but I find it rather difficult to believe that Class of 1984 has any such agenda. Hell, I don't think it very likely that this film has any agenda at all. Films with serious agendas are usually told with a corresponding seriousness of tone, and genuinely conservative films have a deep-seated resentment for the sort of cheap thrills that Class of 1984 trades in. The failure of the police is only a means by which to sharpen and intensify the struggle between Norris and Stegman. If Norris could just go to the proper authorities, it would be impossible to explain away why he's hunting down and killing his students Zaroff-style. Any political message here is subordinate to that thrill.

Class of 1984 succeeds where Blackboard Jungle (1955) failed because it's not some high-minded film with a serious moral message, instead it's a nasty little exploitation film out to deliver some visceral thrills. It's not afraid to be funny, but when it does indulge in humor it is the sort that is so twisted and disturbing that it comes back around as hilarious. Its a film that has a teacher giving a biology lesson with a drawn gun, occasionally waving the piece at a student that gets out of line and remarking on how much more pleasant the act of teaching while armed is. Later on, when the same teacher gets loaded, climbs into his car and tries to run-down some teenage hooligans, the audience is expected to applaud his effort to keep the streets clean. This is a film whose core attraction is the ridiculous violence and the over-the-top depiction of juvenile criminality, and which moreover understands that this is the main draw. There's no real moral, nor any real message more complex than evil people are evil and good people are good. It's a film that achieves its own modest goals with a degree of style and ease that only serves to make the earlier films look absurd. It's a damn fine picture, that will only be hampered by any attempt to force it into a moral framework.