1982@40: CLASS OF 1984

Slick young music teacher Andrew starts work at a school where the kids have to go through airport security to get in. There is a principal but the halls and classes are run by the gang of punques led by the fiery Stegman. These things come together in the first music class where the band, when the gang allows them to play, sucks. Andrew clears the room of thugs and sets to work, having made Stegman an enemy for life. So, what happens then? What do you think?

The pattern set by Blackboard Jungle was not changed by To Sir With Love and that wasn't changed by this. The sole differences between these three (and scores of others) is the wardrobe and the extremity. So if a teacher's rare record collection is trashed in Blackboard Jungle the biology teacher's lab animals have to be skinned and skewered. Andrew's wife isn't just threatened, she's raped in her own house and then kidnapped. The rest is what mainstream USA thought punks were.

There was an episode of the para-detective show Quincy where the punks looked like Alice Cooper clones and their bands sang songs with lyrics like: saw a beggar the other day, stole his pencils and ran away... Among other such nihilistic warcries. Then Phil Donahue had some examples of punk on his talk show but that was after this movie and they looked like Alice Cooper was going for a Siouxsie/Robert Smith look. To his credit Donahue sought to neutralise the threat felt by the straighter of his crowd but while that might be comendable it just don't sell movie tickets. The punks in Class of 1984 are a bunch of violent petty criminals of the kind that would have been ordered to smarten up if they were anywhere near genuine organised crime. But they have spiky hair and were made bad.

Andrew played  by Perry King, who is so 1974 in 1982 he has a tightly groomed beard, is a kind of bipedal cardboard cutout of concern until the bad kids drive him to being a cardboard cutout of rage. The always welcome Roddy McDowall is the cynical biology teacher with a "victimise here" tattoo on his forehead and pressure valve ready to ping. Stegman, punk in chief who would never be seen at a CND rally (like a real punk) is an identikit bad guy. A young 'n' chubby Michael J Fox is one of the kids who really only wants to be good. And so on. 

There is a lot of violence in this film which you are told about in a pre-title card that includes some figures that look like stats about violence in schools. There is a title card at the end which carries an exoneration that would make Donald Trump blush. Between those two points there are a lot of overcooked scenes involving slam dancing punks at a club, a canteen diversion riot to cover a knifing and a third act that is little more than catalogue of vengeance stunts. If you were lulled at all by the apparent concern in the opening card the effect would have worn to tissue by the opening scenes. Apart from the rape of Diane (Andrew's wife) which is disturbingly rompy (and not in a Clockwork Orange intentional way) most of the violence is unremarkable by the standards of even a few years after the release date of this film. Is any of it mitigated by the scene in which Stegman reveals himself to be an accomplished classical pianist? No, but the way that scene plays out, well against expectations, should tell you a thing or two about what you are watching.

There is a point beyond which an attempt at ridiculing this movie is futile and that is an admission that it in no way claims to be anything other than an exploitation flick. To its credit, it does shape up towards the end as a muscular action thriller but, really, it's abouyt goodies and baddies and the baddies look like punks on Donahue. Writer/director Mark Lester, who has a long rap sheet of perfectly respectable genre films lays this one out like an updated Sam Fuller or even Roger Corman without the commentary of the first or the style of the second.

And it's not just those title cards that anchor this (intentionally) back to Blackboard Jungle (or its era at least) but the choice of the song as the title cut. It's a kiiiiind of synthpop punk thing called I am the Future, sung by Alice Cooper. Though I am from the generation who found its depiction of punk culture laughable, I see no more harm in it than in Corman's biker gangs: both serve a fiction in costumes. It's not the Quincy punks as much as the vileness of the heroism that gets me. This film fulfils its claims to the last. Maybe I'm not fond of the claims.

Oh, just so you know, no, this film's title does not mean that it makes any allusions to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The year of the same name was only two years after the release date of this one and is only in the title to evoke bad stuff, the society depicted in it looks as much like 1982 as anything else made then.