Featuring a Young Brad Pitt

The slasher boom of the 1980s led to a lot of films. As we’ve discussed before, the success of two films, Black Christmas and Halloween, effectively cemented the slasher as a horror genre. Audiences ate the films up, and what had been a nascent, still forming genre before 1978 suddenly took off. The 1970s saw 108 slasher films (as per Wikipedia), and many of those barely would count as slashers in the current sense of the term. But after Black Christmas and Halloween defined the genre as we know it, the 1980s saw a whopping 256 entries. That’s a massive jump, and it showed that studios really thought any slasher idea was bankable. Most weren’t.

The formula, as they saw it, was simple: take some teens, put them into a dangerous situation with a (frequently) unknown killer, and then let the bodies fall while ticket sales rise. For a number of years this worked really well, but as the decade wore on, the formula wore out. By the late 1980s, many were already turning out, in large part because just about everything that could be done with the genre had been. There really wasn’t anything more to say (at least until Scream came along and redefined the genre again).

By the time Cutting Class came out in 1989 the genre was on its last legs and this film did not help matters. Produced by April Films and put out right at the very end of the year, this is a film that feels like it’s running on fumes, unsure of even how to be a slasher. Do audiences want something campy, or scary, or silly? Well, the movie reasons, why not do all of those things. It’s a mess of a movie that tries to do too much and yet, somehow, does so little with what it’s got that it never comes together in any meaningful way. In fact, the only real reason to even bother paying attention to it at all is because it has a young Brad Pitt in one of his earliest leading roles… and even that doesn’t help save this film.

Paula Carson (Jill Schoelen) is a model student at her high school. She’s smart, pretty, and liked by just about everyone. She gets good grades, participates in all the after school activities, volunteers for all the events, and even is on the cheerleading squad. She has a hunky boyfriend, Dwight Ingalls (Brad Pitt), who is the star basketball player at the school, and in general seems to have everything going for her. Everyone wants her, or wants to be her, but it never seems to go to her head.

Unfortunately for Paula, things are about to take a very bad turn. After her father, District Attorney William Carson III (Martin Mull), goes on a hunting trip by himself, Paula is left alone right around the same time a killer suddenly starts taking out people. It starts with her father, who is shot by an arrow on his trip, but then teachers and students begin disappearing as well. No one knows who could be doing it, but there are a couple of likely suspects. One is Dwight, who has seemed increasingly unstable as the school year has worn on. Another, though, is Brian Woods (Donovan Leitch), a student who accidentally killed his father and then spent years in a mental institution. Brian is creepy, but seems sweet, but when he’s seen near the scene of a crime, everyone suspects the worst. Was it Brian, or Dwight, or someone else. Paula will have to find out soon if she hopes to survive until graduation.

As I noted above, Cutting Class is a mess. One reason is because the film can’t decide who the killer is supposed to be. It pretty quickly narrows in on two of the main characters, Dwight or Brian, and it waffles back and forth between the two. Dwight gets a lot of screen time, and a lot of development, so we can see who he is and where he’s at mentally. He has a lot of pressure on him, between his dad trying to get him to be a star player with a scholarship, to his grades failing, and his anger issues. He keeps it bottled up until it explodes, and when it does… well, usually people around him die sometime later. Plus, eventually, evidence comes out that points the finger at Dwight.

Brian, meanwhile, is the obvious, crazy character, but he doesn’t get nearly as much development or screen time. He’s a guy that hangs out, staring at people (mostly Paula), but the film struggles to dig into him or really let us into his head space. He’s a trope, really, a cardboard character given a tragic backstory, and to make us care about him, either as victim or killer, we need to know more about him. We need him, in point of fact, to be a character and not just a standee the film moves around from time to time.

It does make a feint at the idea that Brian isn’t the killer, having him present pretty conclusive evidence that Dwight did at least one of the murders. But once the climax comes (and spoilers for a nearly 40 year old movie) the film backtracks and has Brian be the killer after all. There’s no explanation for how he faked the evidence against Dwight. Hell, the film doesn’t even really follow that plot thread at all with Brian pretty quickly showing himself to be the killer even after presenting evidence. It’s like the writers said, “oh, we’ve gotten to page eighty. Time to spend the last ten pages wrapping everything up,” and they quickly ended the script. It doesn’t work.

The reveal of Brian as the killer only points to another issue, though: the film flails about tonally as well. It starts off almost like a teen comedy, with the couple of kills we get played for laughs. It then moves onto being a teen drama, with the focus on Dwight and his issues. When it then twists and becomes a true slasher at the end, we’ve already spent a lot of time with the film barely acknowledging it’s a horror film at all and the climactic last act barely registers. It’s tried to be anything other than a scary movie (and the few kills we got were less than horrifying), so its sudden attempt otherwise feels laughable at best.

Hell, even the actors seem unable to engage with the material. Schoelen is fairly one note as Paula, sweet and demure but without much else going on for her character. Pitt never really lands on a good mode for Dwight, feeling less like a character and more like Pitt himself was just playing himself whenever he found the energy to do so. Leitch barely registers at all, trying to make one scowly face last an entire performance. The only actor really making anything work is Roddy McDowall as the principal, and that’s only because he was too good an actor to ever half-ass anything. His performance is weird, and it feels like it comes from a completely different movie, but I did at least appreciate he was giving us something.

Cutting Class is a bad movie. If it had come out earlier in the decade it might have been a mild success before getting forgotten. As it stands, it didn’t even get that chance in 1989, instead going straight to video so it could be forgotten even faster. Its one notable point, that Brad Pitt is in it, doesn’t really help the film at all. Nothing about this film sells it; it’s a misshapen, ill-conceived thing that was meant to be consigned to the dustbin of history. And, having watched it for myself, that’s where Cutting Class should remain.