Teacher is Angry

We all love The Terminator. It’s a tense and taunt sci-fi thriller about a robot sent back in time to kill someone really, really dead. It has an awesome blend of action and horror elements, culminating in an unforgettable climactic finale. It’s so good that many, many others have tried to emulate its style and story, mostly to lackluster effect. Only one person, original creator James Cameron, has managed the feat of replicating and improving upon that 1984 original (with Terminator 2: Judgment Day), and even then he could only manage that feat once (sorry, Dark Fate). But that hasn’t stopped others from trying.

The fact is that The Terminator has such good visuals that everyone really wanted to see more movies about cool humanoid killer robots. The Terminator came out at a time when there were so many fantastic sci-fi and horror films coming out that any creative producer could take elements and mash them together to create something just distinct enough to not violate copyright, but still identifiable by its various parts. Take a bit of The Terminator, slap on a little corporate malfeasance from RoboCop, and then add a splash of dystopia filtered out of Escape from New York and, boom, you have a whole new property.

That is, quite clearly, the process used to design Class of 1999, a futuristic dystopian thriller about the war zone of drugs, sex, and gangs that would be American high schools in 1999. The film was made in 1990, so obviously another decade forward would somehow see everything turn to hell and high schools become warzones. I want to credit the film for being forward thinking, predicting security detection scans and worrying about the violence in schools (because we do see a ton of mass shootings in schools now), but that’s about all I can credit this film for. This is a hokey, silly bit of 1990s schlock that is really only notable for trying to be all these other, better films all at once.

In 1999 American high schools have become gangland havens. The government has given up on these schools, setting all the high schools in major cities aside as free-fire zones, unprotected by the laws of the land. But this lack of governmental enforcement has only made the corporate interests more amenable to finding their own solution. MegaTecch head, Dr. Bob Forrest (Stacy Keach), pitches a new breed of teachers to the principal of Seattle’s Kennedy High School, Dr. Miles Langford (Malcolm McDowell), to handle the ruffians in school. These new teachers – John P. Ryan as Mr. Hardin, Pam Grier as Miss Connors, Patrick Kilpatrick as Mr. Bryles – are androids programmed to educate… and punish.

Into this new program goes Cody Culp (Bradley Gregg), a former gang member aligned with the Blackhearts gang. He was sent to prison for a couple of years, but has been released to go back to high school and, this time, actually make it through the year. His freedom is dependent on sticking to the rules, but when new girl Christie Langford (Traci Lind) needs help, Cody puts himself in the way of a rival gang’s advances. This puts him on the wrong side of the line, as far as the cyborg teachers are concerned, and now they’re coming for Cody and the girl. It’s going to lead to all out war at the high school before the year is done.

The concept of Class of 1999 is deeply silly. It feels like a teen dystopian pastiche that, somehow, actually made it to the screen without everyone laughing it out of existence. Small parts of it are sensible – high schools falling apart due to gang violence, or the drug problem becoming endemic in low-income areas – but the way the film slaps it altogether in this silly, dystopian wrapper, just doesn’t really work. The goal, clearly, was to have high schoolers fight terminator-like robots, and I get it. But to get there the film has to jump through so many narrative hoops and so many silly sci-fi contortions that it loses all sense of being a fun little action film.

I think, even just the basic concept would be considered a little silly, in that robot teachers taking on kids in the near-future would be some kind of amusing joke more than a real sci-fi plot. The film should have gone harder on the sci-fi, honestly, embracing it further and setting the film in, say, the year 2050 (which was distant back in 1990), while laying on a thick sci-fi aesthetic and really running with the idea. Teachers like RoboCop sitting in classes, dishing out street justice doesn’t like dumb fun, and I could get behind that. Everything else layered onto this film isn’t needed.

Frankly, the whole Escape from New York-style setup, with schools being free-fire zones doesn’t go anywhere. The second Cody shows up for school, there’s already armed guards there enforcing the laws, so what was the point of that idea? MegaTech is supposed to be this large, evil conglomerate but its head, Dr. Forrest, can’t even manage this project properly. We don’t see much influence from the corporation, nor is it ever truly made clear how killer teaching robots are supposed to be a money-making endeavor. It’s explanations for the setup that just cause more questions without adding anything to the actual story.

Thing is, I do find the very core story of the film compelling. I like the setup for Cody, making him a former violent offender who has cleaned up hi\s ways and wants to leave his old life behind. That gives him a moral high ground to stand on, while also establishing stakes for him and what he wants to do. If he gives in to violence, even to protect someone he likes, he gets punished and could go back to jail. But if he doesn’t stand up for what’s right, then wouldn’t that compromise his reformation? It’s a good moral question to ask, even if the film doesn’t do a great job exploring it.

Instead it really just wants to build up to the final action sequence of the movie where all the gang members come together and invade the school so they can fight the robotic killers. In fairness, the practical effects on display here are great, and it’s pretty clear that most of the $5.2 Mil budget went into this sequence. Each of the robots transforms in some way, revealing the weapons built into their bodies. There’s even one that gets mostly ruined but is still able to walk around, like the T-800, stalking the students in the school. It’s great on a visual front, but the rest of the movie around it feels shallow and confused.

I like the ideas behind Class of 1999, but I think the execution of the film was sorely lacking. I’m not the only one, either, as audiences in 1990 rejected the film. It was only able to make $2.4 Mil during its theatrical run (less than half its budget), and then was largely forgotten by the general public. That seems fitting for a film that really couldn’t figure out what it wanted to do or say outside of, “aren’t robotic killer teachers cool?” I mean, yes, they are, but that’s not enough on its own to build a film, and Class of 1999 never really comes up with a better story than that. Without that, the film just can’t keep it together at all. Its failure was inevitable.

Oddly, this film is actually a sequel of sorts, although without any actual connection to the film that came before. That film, Class of 1984, was about gangs in high schools but without any of the sci-fi or robots. This film did also spawn a direct-to-video sequel, Class of 1999 II: The Substitute, but that one is even more obscure than this dystopian riff on teen life.