CLASS OF 1999 (1990) Review

Directed by: Mark L. Lester
Written by: Mark L. Lester, C.Courtney Joyner, John Skipp
Starring: Bradley Gregg, Traci Lind, Malcolm McDowell, Stacy Keach, Pam Grier, Patrick Kilpatrick, John P. Ryan

"HIRED TO TEACH. PROGRAMMED TO KILL!"

Welcome to the distant future of the year 1999. The good ol' U.S. of A (and specifically its education system) is falling apart and large areas of its major cities are under the control of vicious gangs. These so-called 'Free-Fire Zones' are so out of control that even the police are too afraid to enter, resulting in lawless battlegrounds and constant gang-driven turf wars. Kennedy High School just happens to be smack-bang in the middle of one of these Free-Fire Zones in an area of Seattle which is home to a pair of warring gangs; The Blackhearts and the Razorheads.

Principal Miles Langford (McDowell) is so sick of the unruly students and lawless state of his school that he agrees to take part in an experiment headed by Dr. Bob Forrest (Keach), a member of the Board of Government Educational Defence. The experiment involves bringing a trio of new teachers to the school, but not just any teachers. The new faculty members may look human but are in fact ex-military cyborgs, reprogrammed to both educate and discipline their students. At first they function as expected, getting just physical enough to keep the students in line, but soon the cyborgs begin to revert to their original military programming and their discipline turns brutal and fatal. Now it's up to recently paroled Blackheart Cody (Gregg) and principal's daughter Christie (Lind) to try and unite the two rival gangs and destroy their new teachers before they all find themselves in eternal detention.

Director Mark L. Lester's follow up to the cult classic CLASS OF 1984 is a pseudo-sequel (later followed by CLASS OF 1999 II) which takes quite a departure from the original and is probably all the better off for it. A direct sequel just wouldn't have worked but 1999 takes a different path and lets action, violence and special effects take centre stage, giving little concern to things like 'plot development' or 'character development' - but hey who needs that kind of crap anyway? Indeed the last half hour of the film is a spectacular melange of motorbikes, bullets, blood and shit blowing up. It's almost like BRONX WARRIORS meets THE TERMINATOR as the delinquent thugs race around the school trying to destroy the weaponized 'teachers'.

But there's plenty more to enjoy aside from the violence and effects work like the suitably thumping soundtrack including an early tune from Nine Inch Nails (who were credited as The Nine Inch Nails). And of course I can't forget to mention the barrage of amazing/terrible one-liners. Telling the History teacher-bot "You're history!" before blowing his cranial circuitry all over the wall? Priceless. Plus how many movies give you the opportunity to get a glimpse of Pam Grier's robo-nipples? Stacy Keach does a great job hamming it up as a mad scientist type too. It's hard to believe that McDowell, Grier and Keach all ended up in this low budget schlockfest but I'm glad they did. In fact I'm going to go out on a limb and say (and I'm probably in the minority here) that CLASS OF 1999 is infinitely more enjoyable than its predecessor. It may not be as 'good' a movie but it is much more entertaining. Well worth a look.

THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN (1977) Review

Directed by: William Sachs
Written by: William Sachs
Starring: Alex Rebar, Burr DeBenning, Myron Healey, Ann Sweeny, Michael Alldredge

"THE FIRST NEW HORROR CREATURE!"

"You've never seen anything, 'til you've seen the Sun through the rings of Saturn!" - so says Astronaut Steve West (Rebar) right before being bombarded with radiation and crossing the gross, dripping threshold between being a human and being THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN! Critics seem to love shitting all over this movie (it's sitting at 8% on Rotten Tomatoes right now while its audience score is a much more appropriate 68%)
but you can't fault it for delivering exactly what it promises; a melting man. The 'plot' basically consists of a liquefying man in a blind rage, murdering people indiscriminately while wearing buckets of Rick Baker's excellent practical effects.

Essentially FIRST MAN INTO SPACE or THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT brought forward a couple of decades, THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN takes a common '50s premise and updates it with some classic '70s effects. Astronaut Steve West is orbiting Saturn when some super space radiation comes out of nowhere and gives him a gnarly nosebleed. Back on Earth Steve is lying in a hospital bed, covered with bandages, and this is when he begins his slimy transformation into the titular melting man. He terrorizes a fat nurse, escaping the hospital in the process and then goes on an all out killing spree, becoming stronger and more violent as he melts. It's up to Dr Ted Nelson (DeBenning) and General Michael Perry (Healey) to stop him, but only if Dr Nelson can find some goddamn crackers to go with his goddamn soup!

 Apart from a radical drippy mutoid murdering people we're also treated to an array of some of the most interesting scenes I've seen lately. One of the best is when Dr Nelson tries to pull one of those "hey, look over there!" distractions on his wife, making a HUGE deal about not having crackers to go with his soup just because he wants to avoid talking about the melting man that's on the loose. Brilliant. Then there's the nurse who jumps through a window (in slow-motion) for no reason at all. And then of course there's 'The Adventures of Severed Head' in which we watch (for no reason) as a disembodied noggin floats down a river and then down a waterfall before smashing on sharp rocks at the bottom. How integral are these scenes to the movie? Not at all, but they're brilliant.

THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN is most definitely not everybody's cup of tea. The melting man cares not for plot! The melting man cares not for character development! The melting man cares not for explaining things! In fact the melting man only really cares for murder, and the movie only really cares about the melting man. And there's nothing wrong with that. If gore, slime, boobs and slime is the kind of thing you look for in a movie then you're in luck because that's about all you'll get in this brilliantly '70s schlockfest.