The following is a true story and I can name witnesses.  The year was 1985.  I was starting my senior year of high school in a town I’d lived in just under eight months.  I had two friends and they had both graduated the year before.  In short, I was lost. 

I walked in to my first class of the day (A.P. English… go figure) and I got my first warning that all was not right with this school.  Someone complained about “Mr. Lew” and said how grateful they were that they didn’t have his chemistry class. 

“Fuck me,” I thought.  I had Mr. Lew (short for Lewshinski) in sixth period, the last class of the day.

“What’s the deal with Mr. Lew?” I asked, “I’ve got him this year.”

The person I asked was an honor student who had spent her junior year taking chemistry from Lewshinski. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me with pity in her eyes and said, “Man, that guy’s an alien.  Whatever you do, make sure you keep your notebook accurate.”

Thus began a yearlong odyssey with me carefully paddling through the treacherous waters of the science called chemistry while trying not to invoke the wrath of one of the most sexually repressed individuals I’ve ever had the misfortune of interacting with.  This guy would smile at you one minute and then bury you in a withering verbal assault the next.  Think Alex Trebek, only gayer.  He took pleasure in rewarding his students who excelled, but he took greater pleasure in crippling the weakest in the herd. 

All along, the key to survival was that goddamned notebook. Students were required to copy notes from the board every day. Those notes along with all homework and all quizzes and these items were required to be kept in that notebook so we could refer to them when studying.

This man had elevated "anal retentive" from a personality trait to a fucking art form.  He was not human.  But that’s not all.  He would do things like show slides from his vacation in Greece on the day before Christmas break and punish anyone who talked or fell asleep during the showing.  He was bent on the willful and wanton destruction of the human race and he was going to accomplish it one student at a time. 

Luckily for me, he didn’t have the incredibly efficient reproductive capabilities of the aliens in The Faculty.  Either that or he didn’t have the orientation required for said reproduction.

I missed The Faculty when it first hit theaters.  I was in a funk or too drunk to care and I let it pass.  When I heard about the DIMP Back To School theme week, I thought this would be a great way to knock a flick off my list of 235 films I still want to watch and also fulfill my duty to (I’m not allowed to discuss details but I can say that Federal Judges were involved). 

What a great flick!  First off, I completely missed the fact that Robert Rodriguez directed this.  I had no clue!  If I’d known that when it was released, I would probably have sobered up long enough to hit a theater. 

Secondly, what a great cast!  The talent here is unbelievable.  Elijah Wood, Clea Duvall, Robert Patrick, Josh Hartnett… okay well he was good in this one.  Those are just a few of the names though.  There are even big names in the small parts.  Salma Hayek plays a school nurse who is on camera approximately seven minutes of the whole film.  Usher is on camera even less and his face is plastered across the DVD cover. 

Finally, what’s a great director and great cast without a well written story?  Sure it’s a rip-off of the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers theme.  Yes, there are some plot holes here and there and yeah, you kind of want to scream at the aliens for not taking care of business instead of letting six kids get the better of them, but it’s a horror movie.  That’s expected. 

The story is simple.  Parasitic aliens are taking over a school in Ohio by first infecting the faculty (thus the title) and then the students.  It’s the beginning of an invasion that will spread across America if not stopped and there are six plucky kids, all from different social groups, who are just the ones to do it.  The real reason the film works so well though is that it paints high school as a living hell and for many of us, that’s exactly what it was. 

Prior to the invasion, the film is full of fistfights, unprovoked antagonism of nerdy kids, people striving for identity and outcasts pining to be one with the in-crowd.  Watching as the new girl enters the school for the first time, I cringed, remembering my first day of my senior year.  Suddenly, having experienced meeting Mr. Lew in real life, the movie didn’t seem so far-fetched.

Better yet, once the invasion begins, the lure of being accepted and included makes the idea of giving in to the aliens rather palatable by comparison.  As the queen says to Elijah Wood’s character, the invasion would result in “a world without anger, without fear, without attitude, where the underachiever goes home at night to parents that care. The jock can be smart, the ugly duckling beautiful, and the class wuss doesn't have to live in terror.” All they have to do is give in and I’m telling you, if that were me and your fate depended on my resistance, you’d all be fucked.

I say that not just because of the “outcast” thing but also because the aliens know how to hit where it counts.  High school was all hormones and in The Faculty even the frumpiest of teachers comes to school looking sexy after she’s been infected.  I wouldn’t have lasted a second as a student trying to resist with the likes of Bebe Neuworth (never on my list of faves but hot in this one), Famke Janssen (currently on my top 20 list), Salma Hayek (in the top 5) and Clea Duvall (let’s just say I like the ones who are hard to get) trying to seduce me into becoming one with the queen. 

Shawn McLoughlin wrote a review of Satan’s Blood for this site in which he stated, “In horror film history, bad things happen to stupid people.”  The great thing about The Faculty is that bad things are happening to smart people.  Even the ones who know something is going on can’t avoid it and not because they’re making stupid mistakes.  It’s because there really is no escape. 

Rodriguez uses all of this to his advantage and spins a fun, exciting and tense sci-fi story that brings the horror of high school home in a big way. 

So… how does it look?
It looked fine to me.  The only regrettable thing is that the CGI is looking a little dated.  Still, everything looks better than that goddamned CGI werewolf in Van Helsing! 

And the sound?
Dolby Digital 5.1 means that when the shit hits the fan, you will feel the rumble in your gut.  The Faculty sounds great.  The soundtrack dates the movie faster than anything else.  One forgettable band after another does one forgettable song after another.  The worst offenders are Shawn Mullins (who is from my adopted home state of Georgia and who I want to bitch-slap so badly my hands are shaking), Creed and a “supergroup” called The Class of 99 (featuring some guys from Alice In Chains, Rage Against the Machine and Porno for Pyros).  Mullins destroys Bowie’s “Changes” and Creed does a horrendously ham fisted take on Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen”. The Class of 99 covers Pink Floyd… You can guess the song…

Extras
There are none to speak of. You get a theatrical trailer and that’s it. 

The Bottom Line
No matter what else you say about The Faculty, you can’t say it’s not a fun ride.  Dimension Films should pull this one out and look at it again to remind themselves why horror movies shouldn’t skimp on the “R” rating.  As for the 3.5 pants rating, the movie is great but I really would love to see some extras.  A commentary from Rodriguez would have bumped it up to 4.

Oh, and one last thing about “Mr. Lew”.  While he was definitely not from this planet, he was not smart enough to hide the key to the chemical locker.  That’s how my friends and I got the ingredients to make a pretty powerful bomb, which we then used to vandalize school property.  So you see, it’s true.  Aliens always have a weakness.