The Faculty (1998) For the purposes of Halloween season, let us return to the 1990's reign of Harvey and Bob Weinstein......when the brothers so dominated cinema, they could even branch off into cheap hip horror featuring a freshman class of new young talent.
By any rational critical standards, this movie sounds like a train wreck.....a barely slapped together pastiche of John Hughes teen angst, Don Siegel's "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers" and John Carpenter's once reviled but now revered gooey, gory remake of "The Thing".
It would've required extraordinary skill to seamlessly blend those separate elements into a cohesive whole. But writer Kevin Williamson ("Dawson's Creek", "Scream") and shoot-fast-from-the-hip director Robert Rodriguez ("From Dusk Til Dawn", "El Mariachi") didn't waste a second fitting this stuff together....
In a fast and frenzied 104 minutes, they throw all the tropes at you all at once......teen torment, humans reduced to alien slaves and tentacled monsters with snapping jaws.....like a huge plate of steaming spaghetti hurled against the wall to see if any of it sticks......
It doesn't really matter that much. To hell with seamless.......nobody's looking for artistic perfection in a movie where a severed head sprouts tentacles and scampers away. . Williamson, Rodriguez and the cast are so filled with enthusiasm and clearly enjoying a kick-ass good time, all you can do is sit back, push the safety bar down and take their fun-house/rollercoaster ride.
The movie establishes its very own 'Breakfast Club' with lightning speed.....a.too-cool-for-school genius (Josh Hartnett), a Mean Girl Queen Bee (Jordana Brewster), a conflicted jock sick of machismo (Shawn Hatosy), a chatty virginal southern belle (Laura Harris), a suffer-no-fools goth lesbian (Clea Duvall) and a diminutive, bullied nerd (Elijah Wood).
This oddball gang's forced to face off against their alien infected faulty, who were no bowl of cherries to deal with even when still human. (And well played with various degrees of either slyly understated menace or over-the-top evil by Robert Patrick, Piper Laurie, Famke Jannsen, Salma Hayek, Bebe Neauwirth Jon Stewart and Daniel von Bargen)
Williamson's script, by its very nature, can only flesh out the teens' characters on the fly as Rodriguez hurls them from one harrowing alien encounter to the next......(including a drug-addled send up of "The Thing"s famous pass-or-fail test to detect who's human and who's not)
It's one chaotic mess of a movie that plays like it's stitched together with scotch tape, but that doesn't make it any less fun to watch. BQ recommends you gobble it down like any other Halloween treat......a cinematic bag 'o candy corn to wolf down on a chilly October night. 3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2).
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