Class Of 1999 (1990) – Review

Kids these days. I swear, sometimes I despair.
Back in the days before CGI, colour correcting and online movie pundits who seem to think it’s cool to hate everything, it seemed that audiences were far more accepting of the ridiculous excess the 80s and the 90s would serve up regularly on a plate. Sylvester Stallone fighting off an entire Vietnamese army on his jack jones? Cool! Harrison Ford jumping an out of control minecraft across a gap in the tracks? Bravo! Absolutely everything that occurs within the running time of Con Air? Bellissimo! However, these day, if something hasn’t been Nolanized to a state of perpetual realness or loaded with unnecessary amounts of Snyderesque gravitas, then you have a horde of angry internet junkies metaphorically spitting directly into its face.
This brings us to Mark L. Lester’s gloriously illogical Class Of 1999, which arrived on the scene in 1990 and proceeded to give a stern middle finger to anything remotely resembling common sense or realism before getting down to the far more important job of being fuckin’ awesome.
Ready for an intensive class about how great an idiotic sci fi/action can really be? Settle down, punks – class is in session.

In an alternate nineties than the one we experienced, gang warfare between youths and school shootings had reached such an all time high that in certain parts of America, free fire zones have been declared where police have no jurisdiction whatsoever – hmmm, doesn’t sound that different to me… Anyway, in Seattle in the year of 1999, we find two gangs fighting for control of Seattle – the Blackhearts and the Razorheads – yet between bouts of vicious gunplay, for some reason these punks actually still turn up to school everyday even though they’re locked in a blood fued with around a third of their classmates.
However, a rather extreme solution is being put into play by the CIAs Department of Educational Defence, who, with the help of the MegaTech corporation, has decided to deploy three human looking battle droids into classrooms to act as teachers who can endorse the necessary discipline when needed. If this idea seems as potentially disastrous as having a candle lit bath in gasoline, then you’d absolutely be bang on the money as Mr. Bryles, Mr. Hardin and Ms. Connors soon slip back into their old war machine programming and start offing their students.
Into this mess wanders former gang leader Cody Culp who has just emerged from jail with the intent to turn his young life around, but after being caught between his feelings for principal’s daughter Christie and the pressure of rejoining his disgruntled old gang, surely being targeted by a trio of killer robot teachers should be just like every other school day, right?

To give a brief history lesson on Class Of 1999, it’s something of a spiritual sequel to Lester’s own Class Of 1984, a thriller that saw beleaguered teaching staff victimized by their violent students. However, a new decade requires a new stance and this time round it’s the feral, knife-waving students who are the heroes and it’s the teachers who are the mindless killers. Of course, it around about here that you start to realise that Class Of 1999 isn’t so much a movie as it is about a half dozen gargantuan plot holes wearing a trenchcoat disguising itself as a movie as so much of its premise is just spectacular nonsense. Actually, nonsense is too civilised a word for such a ridiculous movie, whereas “awesome bollocks” fit the film’s aesthetic far more comfortably – but while this might sound like I’m trying to make all this detrimental, I can assure you that if you just let the plot holes roll over you like a delirious drug haze, you’re in for a fucking treat.
For a start, Mark L. Lester is the guy who gave us the most Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that has ever existed in the form of the equally preposterous Commando, and the director has no qualms about diving into this Terminator ripoff with both eyes wide open. But while the movie backhands you across the chops with such notions as violent teen gang members who actually go to class on time and android war machines who are let loose to teach with their various murder gizmos such as a flamethrower, a missile launcher and a brain driller still intact and operational. Once you muscle past such epically lazy storytelling, you are free to enjoy a balls to the wall actioner that overachives like nobody’s business with tons of gunplay, vast explosions and a cool gnarly death guaranteed every few minutes. In fact, at times it feels like that other superlative, pulpy, underseen sci-fi/actioner, The Hidden, that achieved similar wonders with a plot that was essentially “alien slug criminal possesses people”.

But while the film delivers more than it’s fair share of robot carnage, there’s even greater pleasures to be found in its wonderful, B-Movie cast. While having the dude who got turned into a marionette in Nightmare On Elm Street Part 3 play the tough, action hero lead seems to be a spot of miscasting (Bradley Gregg seems to be channeling Corey Feldman for some reason), the remainder of the younger cast contain familiar genre faces that’ll have you wracking your brain to recall where you’ve seen them before (Fright Night Part II’s Traci Lind and Near Dark’s Joshua John Miller – in case you were wondering). However, it’s the adult cast that’s utterly loaded with iconic figures from genre filmmaking. Malcolm McDowell – no stranger to rowdy youths himself thanks to A Clockwork Orange and If… – plays the principal, while the killer androids are played by a bevvy of action veterans that includes Cannon stalwart John P. Ryan, Blaxploitation goddess Pam Grier and Patrick Kilpatrick who, throughout his career, has been killed by the cream of the action crop. However, taking the overacting honors is Stacy Keach, who goes to fucking town with his laughably amoral scientist who rocks albino eyes and a snow white mullet while he either casually eats bananas in the lab or randomly drinks pints of milk while eating in restaurants. He’s obviously having the time of his life and you get the feeling that everyone is just vibing hard off the silliness of the plot that you can’t help but agree as Lester copies his homework from the James Cameron playbook while adding his own little flourishes.

Some may recoil at the weapons grade stupidity, but anyone who enjoys a balls-out, 90s explod-a-thon will be well served by signing up to this particular class ASAP.
Here endeth the lesson.

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