Class of 1999 (

1990

)

The most impressive thing about Mark L. Lester's Class of 1984 (1982), was the way that it took the familiar plot line of Blackboard Jungle (1955) and turned it into the lurid exploitation film that its marketing material had always presented it as. In particular, the film was quite impressive for making its audience cheer for a teacher as he viciously murdered his young charges. The whole thing plays out like an extension of the origin story for a slasher like Madman (1981), where a bunch of shitty kids gradually push a regular Joe into becoming a killer, only instead of invoking fear in the audience, we are expected to actively cheer for him. Class of 1999 is similarly unhinged, though going in the opposite direction, as it makes the audience side with the petty criminals, punks, and renegade students as they hunt down and exterminate their teachers.

That description is somewhat disingenuous though, as the teachers here are not flesh-and-blood individuals but rather military-surplus combat droids that have been retooled and reprogrammed for use in American public schools. If that sounds like a crazy idea, you'd be right, but it was a whole helluva a lot less insane when you look at the state of inner-city American schools circa the late 1980s and early 1990s. These were years when the violent crime rates were growing at an astronomical rate and inner-city schools were often little better than war zones for juvenile gangs. In the age of occasional mass school shootings, we tend to forget that for decades American schools were breeding grounds for a less spectacular form of violence. In such a period I'm sure more than a few people wished that they could have Robocop (1987) teaching Biology while The Terminator (1984) lectures on English literature.

Indeed, Class of 1999 takes things a step further than the bloody anarchy of 1990s America, by bringing the trend of inner city, juvenile violence to its logical extreme: a future where gangs are so numerous and so violent that whole sections of American cities are basically abandoned by law enforcement and turned into “free fire zones.” Obviously, the schools located in these Mad Max (1979) hellholes are gonna be worried about more than just truancy. Hell, it would probably be for the best if fewer violent underage gangsters showed up for class, that way the non-violent students might have a chance to learn something rather than spend their time dodging gunfire in the hallways.

In the film, things have gotten so bad that the government has formed a new branch to handle these benighted regions: The Department of Educational Defense (DED). The fledgling bureaucracy isn't having the best results though, and they are starting to get desperate. So desperate indeed, that the principal of Kennedy High School, located right smack dab in the center of one of the nation's worst free fire zones, has agreed to a hair-brained scheme of using a re-purposed trio of military combat droids as teaching bots. It's not like the brains behind the program, one Dr. Forrest is likely to inspire confidence either. He's a bizarre-looking albino with milky white eyes and a rat tail, that seems to subsist entirely on a cocktail of fortified milk. The fact that he seems to be gleefully encouraging the teacher-bots to psychically assault the more difficult members of the student body is even more alarming.

Indeed, The program gives every indication of being sabotaged from the start. For one thing, the combat droids are still equipped with all their most deadly weapons, albeit concealed beneath their synthetic skin. I fail to see the educational utility of outfitting a teacher with a rocket launcher, a flame thrower, or a drill-claw. Worse still, as part of the terms and conditions of Forrest's experiment, a whole bunch of juvenile criminals will be released on probation and required to attend Kennedy High School. It's not like there was any shortage of troublesome students at Kennedy High School before, and these convicts are only going to add the worst or the worst (or at least the ones dumb enough to get caught) back into circulation. Forrest wants things to go off the rails and go off the rails quickly, presumably because he, like the audience, is hoping for a massive body count.

One of those students released from jail early is Cody Culp, who by all accounts was a real hell-raiser with his gang the Black Hearts back in the day. However, a couple of years in the clink seems to have done wonders for the boy's perspective and now he wants nothing more than to keep his head down, quit drugs, leave his gang, and graduate high school. Sure, he doesn't exactly seem like the kind of guy who will get a job in an office filing paperwork, but it looks like his days as a full-fledged criminal are behind him. Hell, when he gets out he doesn't even want to get high with his brothers Sonny and Angel, and their strung-out single mom. Naturally, this change of heart makes Cody's family (who are all still in the Black Hearts) rather hostile to their wayward son. The other members of the gang aren't exactly thrilled with his reformation either, and his former rivals from the Razor Heads, in particular their leader Hector, don't give a rats ass that he quit the Black Hearts, to them once a Black Heart always a Black Heart. So Cody goes into Kennedy High with a target painted on his back and damn near every hellion in the student body gunning for him.

He also, for some inexplicable reason, sounds exactly like Luther from The Warriors (1979). It's certainly a bizarre choice for our nominal hero to model his voice off of a character famous for sounding like nails on a chalkboard. I imagine that plenty of viewers would get tired or frustrated with this stick as the film progresses, but as far as I was concerned Cody's voice was a consistent source of mirth, especially during the film's riding action where it occasionally threatens to get boring.

It's not all vengeful gangster and bizarre diction for Cody though. While he may not be a certified criminal anymore, he still has racked up enough bad boy points that he instantly catches the attention of Lincoln High's sole high-society girl, Christie Landford. Indeed, she seems to be interested in Cody mostly because the young convict is all but guaranteed to piss off her father, the school's principal.

The delinquents of Lincoln High quickly discover that there's more to worry about than their fellow criminals, as the trio of teacher-bots (Mr. Hardin, Miss Connors, and Mr. Bryles) have been set to educate with extreme prejudice. At first, they're just administrating a smack upside the head when attacked by unruly students, or a disciplinary spanking for particularly mouthy students. The violence however is being encouraged by Dr. Forrest, who seems to want the teacher to revert fully to their combat programming, and before long the bots are killing students and making it look like gang violence and drug overdoses. After Cody's older brother, Sonny, is killed by Mr. Hardin, Cody begins to get suspicious and starts to investigate the matter himself, along with a little help from Christie. It's not long before they uncover the horrible truth. That will be the easy part, the real trouble is going to be getting any of the reprobates at school to believe that their teachers are actually homicidal robots.

Class of 1999 suffers a bit from not having enough resources to fully realize its ambitions. The depictions of squalor and crime are very impressive when confined to small, specific locations like the school or Cody's house. However, whenever the film needs to show more, like a chase scene down the highway, or a shot of the teacher's house, it starts to falter. These places just look like average streets. I would pin this mostly on bad location scouting, as The Terminator (1984) found plenty of seedy, rundown streets in 1984 that look much more post-apocalyptic than anything on display here. Perhaps the decision to film a dystopian sci-fi film in Seattle was not the wisest move. They should have shelled out the extra cash to film in New York or Los Angeles, or any of the dozens of other American cities that looked like miserable hellholes in 1990.

That said, when the mise-en-scène behaves itself, the film is able to create the illusion of a revolting and frighteningly possible future. It's the attention to detail, like the distant but constant ring of distant gunfire whenever Cody and his family of junkie losers relax in their living room, or the way that the guards at the high school gates promise to return confiscated firearms to their owners once the dismissal bell rings. Sure, the notion that truancy would be a concern of the federal government in a situation where all law and order has collapsed in huge swaths of the nation, is a laughable one. Indeed, I find it very difficult to believe that gangsters as serious as Hector or Sonny would actually bother with school at all. However, I don't ask that my exploitation films have a sensible premise, I only ask that they embrace the absurdity of their ideas and build the world out accordingly. Class of 1999 does this admirably, even when its ambitions fall short of its resources.

Still, the sci-fi trappings and half-realized dystopian setting robs Class of 1999 of some of the immediacy of its predecessor. Class of 1984 (1982) was a story of an inner city teacher driven to the point where he brutally murdered his young charges. It engaged with a grotesque fantasy that I'm sure is not at all uncommon for the men and women in Mr. Norris' shoes. The daydream of killing your teacher is, if anything, even more common among students; to the point where it may be rarer to find a student who hasn't engaged in it than one who has. Yet having the teachers here be metal and circuitry under their fleshy surface robs the audience of some of the perverse thrill of watching a classroom tyrant be cut down by his rebellious students. It's a shame, that a filmmaker with as keen a grasp of sensational ideas backed off from this one, though I can hardly blame him. The propaganda surrounding teachers in this country is absurd, with virtually every media depiction of them being akin to hagiography. Still, if any class deserves a lurid, bloody streak across their saintly image than its teachers, it's just a shame that Lester wasn't able to fully deliver it.

Quibbles aside, Class of 1999 is a fun knock-off of The Terminator (1984) well worth checking out for those interested in old American exploitation films. It may lack some of the charms of its predecessor but manages to be a fun ride all the same.