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Class of 1999 (1990)

Dir: Mark L. Lester

America!
Schooling!
1999!
American schooling in 1999!
It‘s all gone to hell.
Schools have become overrun with gangs. The Police dare not go anywhere near the catchment areas, outside the school grounds guns and drugs are the norm and everywhere is a no-go area for someone as silly looking, hanging onto dying 80’s fashion, rival gangs (who have watched “Mad Max 2” too often) drive around in armoured trucks sporting automatic weapons.

and even though no guns are allowed in schools and military guards enforce the rule with metal detectors and big sticks, there is hardly any teaching going on due to the general abuse, intimidation and hand to hand violence that erupts regularly in the classroom.

Something needs to be done and the new ‘Department of Educational Defence’ sets out to do it.
That something is to hire shady robotics firm ‘Megatech’ and the even shadier albino robo ‘expert’ Dr. Bob Forrest (Stacy Keach, “Roadgames”) to kit out a chosen school with state of the art ‘Robo Teachers’ known lovingly as ‘Tactical Education Units’!
What Dr Forrest has not told anyone is that his chosen ‘Robo Teachers’, Mr. Bryles (Patrick Kilpatrick, “Last Man Standing”), Ms. Connors (Pam Grier, “Coffy“) and Mr. Hardin (John P. Ryan, “It’s Alive”) are all ex-Army droids with a real firm line in discipline!

The school chosen for this little experiment is run by ‘wants to do good, but is a bit of a dick’ headmaster Miles Longford (Malcolm McDowell, “A Clockwork Orange”) and is in the middle of a gang war zone.

When ‘bad boy wanting to do good’ Cody Culp (Bradley Gregg, “NOES 3”) comes out of prison and back to school he starts to notice something is definitely wrong with the new teachers and when students start turning up dead he and Longford’s Daughter Christie (Traci Lind) decide to find out what’s going on….

 

Mark L. Lester’s unconnected sequel to his cult hit “Class of 1984” plays roughly along the same basic lines but instead adds a huge handful of Sci-Fi cheese to the mixture and also gets rather tied up with it’s own mixed message and refusal to make it’s mind up on what it’s plot stands for.
That the ‘students’ it chose to create are almost all gun toting, drug dealing, granny mugging, shoot you in the face scumbags who have turned whole segments of America’s cities into war zones is never in question.
But at the same time it makes the new Robo teachers and Dr Forrest out and out bad guys who are basically out of control.
So who do we root for? Who do we care about? Who the hell should win this term!?

Luckily the character of Cody (well played by the likeable Gregg, who seems to have had a hand in the script as well) is painted as the only gang member wanting to change and Christie is a goody two shoes bundle of sweetness so we at least have a couple of people to empathise with.
But are we really meant to care when a knife wielding, pill popping gang banger gets his scummy arse creamed by Ryan’s Mr Hardin?
Are we really meant to care when gang member is craftily turned against gang member so they wipe each other out?
If I lived near one of these catchment areas from educational hell I can’t say I’d shed a tear.
Obviously knowing this to some extent the cluttered screenplay/story (by Mark Lester, C. Courtney Joyner, Bradley Gregg and John Skipp) has Forrest and his teachers try to silence good boy Cody and any other innocent who gets in the way. These we care about, where as with the out and out gang members we quite frankly don’t care if Forrest and co paint the hallways with them.

Talking of which, the violence is more of your throwaway kind here than the more up close, gory and far more exploitative violence seen in “Class of 1984”. Most of the grue here comes in the form of green, gloopy ‘Robo blood’ and even the few human gore scenes are generally cast away with little thought. In fact the main gore effect near the end of the film is a blink and you miss it affair caught only in one master shot at the bottom of the screen. There’s a nice drill scene moment though to look out for.

The robot FX are as good as anything seen at this time and the on-set ‘puppet’ android models have an old school charm. The weaponry is also fun as arms are shed to reveal rocket launchers and the like.
You can’t get over the fact though that, as in “The Terminator”, the robot incarnations simply don’t have anything like the fluid and fast moves that they showed in their human state and all of a sudden these ’battle droids’ become rather clunky.
It’s all good fun though.

The main joy here (away from a well handled, slam bang, action filled finale) is the acting of certain cast members and some of the dialogue.
McDowell is wasted in a role that quite frankly anyone could have played, and everyone, bar Gregg, who plays the gang members (including the strange looking ‘is it a girl or a boy’ Joshua John Miller from “Near Dark”) are all rather non-descript.
It’s in the ‘bad guys’ where the film really scores .
Keach is actually rather low key (his way out appearance aside) for the most part but has a marvellous moment when he sees one of his teachers get homicidal with a student on a monitor; “Amazing! Simply amazing! Wind that back again”.

Patrick Kilpatrick, always a welcome hard man presence, has fun as the nutty gym teacher from hell and Blacksploitation icon Pam Grier makes for a suitably mean and moody Science teacher with a killer punch.
But it is the always great John P Ryan who totally steals the film. His pipe smoking History teacher is a boiling psychotic gem and he has by far the best scenes with the students.
Spouting lines like “I love to mould young minds” and with wide eyed glee he coldly snuffs out students, orders the other teachers into combat and in the film’s most entertaining scene literally takes two gang bangers in hand, in front of the rest of the class, for a serious case of robotic corporal punishment!
The sight of a Ryan putting what is basically a full grown man over his knee and giving him a good robo spanking is an absolute joy to behold.
In fact Lester has a lot of fun with his droids and you have to smile when a search of their ‘home’ turns up not much more than cupboards full of ‘WD 40’!

There is nothing that original here of course, the opening narration and computer graphics are a blatantly explicit steal from “Escape from New York”, the finale has everything to do with the aforementioned “The Terminator”, the gangs and their cars (as well as an armoured school bus) are straight out of “Mad Max 2” and “The Bronx Warriors” and the basic set-up owes a debt to his own “Class of 1984” of course.
But, aside from its schizo attitude to its extreme gang members (Look! They come from broken homes with junkie parents. Look! One wears a crucifix, he must be a good boy really) and a sometimes mixed message on who we are meant to root for, “Class of 1999” is ultimately a big bundle of fun, wrapped up in a bit of good old fashioned violence, enjoyable sc-fi cheesiness, fun dialogue and some great villains.

“Now I’m going in there to waste some teachers. Anyone with me”? Yeah…we are. Sort of.