Class of 1984

When I was teenager, Class of 1984 was one of my favorite goofball cult movies. Years later, watching this movie is a dramatically different experience, but the film's bizarre appeal remains intact. Class of 1984 helped drag the troubled teenager movie -- think Blackboard Jungle and A Clockwork Orange, two of director Mark Lester's major influences -- into the '80s and spawned a sub-genre that has since produced countless mediocre movies (including Dangerous Minds and 187): the students who bully their teacher movie. The thing is, Class of 1984 is much darker than its knock-offs. This is a film of extremes. The villains are wildly evil, irrational, and even kind of scary, while the heroes are frustratingly naive, terrified, and helpless. Somehow, this clash of polar opposites makes for first-rate entertainment.

Rough edges aside, this is a perfectly respectable film with an impressive cast that includes Roddy McDowall, Michael J. Fox (as the most innocent teenager you've ever seen...and he gets stabbed), and Lords of Flatbush alum Perry King. McDowall is particularly memorable in his two insane meltdown scenes: he pulls a gun on his class and he tries to mow down students with a car. Seriously, these scenes are priceless. There's also a memorably odd theme song ("look at my face / I am the future") by the memorably odd pairing of Lalo Schifrin and Alice Cooper.

In essence, this is a dystopian vision of a future in which teenagers are free to, God forbid, do whatever they want. The movie suggests that, left unchecked, there's evil lurking in every teenager (even Michael J. Fox). The film plays on the paranoia of teenager-fearing adults and dismisses pacifism as a legitimate response to violence in much the same way as right wing vigilante films like Death Wish and Dirty Harry. In other words, the film's perspective is problematic. However, blunt simple-mindedness can also make for good, straightforward, exploitative entertainment, which is precisely what Class of 1984 aims to be. It riles you up and manipulates you -- which isn't a very honorable goal -- but it does these things effectively and I have to give it credit for that.

Anchor Bay has given Class of 1984 fans more than they could have expected, including TV spots, trailers, a PDF of the script, a poster and still gallery, an excellent new featurette, and a commentary by Lester. A wide range of production anecdotes are covered with Lester doing most of the talking. He tries to argue that the film prophetically anticipated the decline of teenagers in general and incidents like Columbine in particular, but this argument seems way out-of-line. Those events happened because troubled teens were bullied and finally exploded. They weren't comparable to the the villains in Class of 1984, they were a response to characters like these.

And no bullying that I've heard about has ever been so brazenly out-in-the-open or directed toward teachers as the haywire abuse dramatized here. In Class of 1984, the bullies get in everyone's face with their insanity and they get away with it because, I don't know, everyone's too lazy or afraid to stop them (except Roddy McDowall). Where Mark Lester sees biting social commentary, I see reactionary escapism. It's not a very plausible scenario and it bears little resemblance to reality but, either way, it's a hoot. -- Jonathan Doyle