director
Robert Rodriguez
screenwriter
Kevin Williamson
story by
David Wechter
Bruce Kimmel
producer
Elizabeth Avellan
cinematographer
Enrique Chediak
music
Marco Beltrami
editor
Robert Rodriguez
cast
Elijah Wood (Casey Connor)
Josh Hartnett (Zeke Tyler)
Clea DuVall (Stokes Mitchell)
Shawn Hatosy (Stan Rosado)
Jordana Brewster (Delilah Profitt)
Laura Harris (Marybeth Hutchinson)
Bebe Neuwirth (Principal Valerie Drake)
Famke Janssen (Miss Elizabeth Burke)
Robert Patrick (Coach Joe Willis)
Jon Stewart (Prof. Edward Furlong)
Piper Laurie (Mrs. Karen Olson)
Usher Raymond (Gabe Santora)
Salma Hayek (Nurse Rosa Harper)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 104m
u.s.
release: December 25,
1998
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other robert
rodriguez films
reviewed on this website:
- desperado
- four
rooms ("misbehavers"
segment)
- from
dusk till dawn (short review)
- once
upon a time in mexico
- sin
city
- spy
kids
|
Crap
comes in various degrees: The Faculty, for example, is
a crappy teen horror movie, but in director Robert Rodriguez's
hands it's at least agreeably crappy. Rodriguez, who made
such a splash six years ago with his $7,000 debut El Mariachi,
now seems to have resigned himself to being a hired gun for Dimension
(Miramax's horror-movie branch), cranking out stuff like From
Dusk Till Dawn and this movie. But, as hired guns go,
Rodriguez has good aim. Even when the script runs out of ammo,
Rodriguez keeps things visually edgy. He may never be more than
a stylish B-movie director, but I'll take his B stuff over failed
A-movies like Patch
Adams.
Written by Kevin Williamson, the new teen avatar, the movie is
an unabashed rip-off of -- uh, sorry, homage to -- the paranoid
subgenre of alien-possession flicks, particularly Invasion
of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter's The
Thing. (There's even a rewrite of the blood-test scene
in The Thing.) The setting: a grungy Ohio high school,
carefully established as chaotic and rowdy at the beginning.
That's so that we'll be alarmed when the rude, crude teenagers
become pod people, marching to their classes in formation. Fine,
but the effect is that most of the teens are so obnoxious that
pod-personhood seems like a graceful alternative.
The teachers are beginning to act strangely, and some of the
most popular students are following suit. As usual, the misfit
students form the core of the resistance: wimpy Elijah Wood,
surly riot-grrl Clea DuVall, faux-dope dealer Josh Hartnett (his
drugs are mostly caffeine, so he's okay), new kid Laura Harris,
and two fallen popular kids, cheerleader Jordana Brewster and
head quarterback Shawn Hatosy -- they all suspect something weird's
going on, and of course no one will believe them, because if
they were credible, the movie would be over quickly.
If, like me, you're a horror fan, you've seen this all before.
It's been done, but has it been done well here? The Faculty
is about high-school kids, so there's a limit on how tacky it
can get (no nudity, for instance) -- it's not quite a cheesy
guilty pleasure like Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn,
which was penned by another hip screenwriter, Quentin Tarantino.
The difference between Tarantino and Kevin Williamson becomes
clear with this movie: Tarantino knows the rules and plays with
them; Williamson plays by them. The Williamson approach,
it's obvious by now, is to have a few scenes in which your characters
comment on the staleness of the plot they're enacting. Which
doesn't make the plot any fresher.
Except for the always-appealing Elijah Wood and the smartly cynical
Clea DuVall, the teen actors don't register; they succeed or
fail to the degree that they sound like they're actually talking
and not rattling off Williamson's hyperarticulate dialogue. More
fun to watch are the possessed teachers, including hipster biology
teacher Jon Stewart, roughneck coach Robert Patrick, wallflower-turned-hellcat
Famke Janssen, dead-voiced Bebe Neuwirth, and just plain scary
Piper Laurie. In their scenes, Rodriguez is in his element; he
doesn't seem to have much interest in the whitebread teenagers,
and so we don't either.
Rodriguez is in his element, too, in the special-effects scenes,
when little sluglike parasites are burrowing around in people's
faces or when the big mama alien makes its appearance -- the
director is like a kid playing with monster toys (he's usually
like a kid playing with action figures). The better parts of
The Faculty are when Rodriguez can leave the script in
the dust and get both hands bloody. His work here is playful
enough to make The Faculty worth a look, but it'll leave
you with a question more disturbing than anything in the movie:
At what point does a talented stylist stop being a director to
watch, and start becoming a hack for hire? |
