THE AISLE SEAT - "THE FACULTY"
by Mike McGranaghan
When Robert Rodriguez took the Sundance Film Festival by storm with his $7,000 movie El Mariachi, he proved to be an intriguing talent - someone who could elevate an exploitation film to new levels. The director went on make Desperado (one of the most stylishly entertaining shoot-em-ups of recent years) and From Dusk Till Dawn (a vampire film that was as gory as it was fast-paced). Now Rodriguez has teamed up with writer Kevin Williamson (the Scream pictures) for The Faculty. It's a match made in horror movie heaven.
The filmmakers themselves have described The Faculty as a cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Breakfast Club. An alien species has invaded the bodies of some small-town Texas high school teachers. The first to go is the football coach (Robert Patrick), a sadistic jerk to begin with. Soon after, the principal (Bebe Neuarth), the school nurse (Salma Hayek) and the science teacher (Jon Stewart) are also inhabited. Once the teachers are transformed, they begin to work on the kids.
It doesn't take too long before a misfit group of students figures out what's happened. They include a street-smart drug dealer (Josh Hartnett), a football star who wants to prove he's not a dumb jock (Shawn Hatosy), a popular cheerleader (Jordana Brewster), a geek (Elijah Wood), a recluse (Clea DuVall) and a southern belle (Laura Harris) who is new to the school.
The Faculty is really a combination of Rodriguez and Williamson's talents. One the one hand, the screenplay is filled with pop culture-literate, self-referential dialogue. The characters often seem to realize that they are in an update of Body Snatchers, because they keep alluding to the plot of that film ("It was just a rip-off of Robert Heinlein's 'The Puppet Masters' anyway," the outcast says at one point). There are also some in-jokes about the movie Scream, as well as a line about how the Elijah Wood character is "the creepy Stephen King-type kid; every school's got one."
On the other hand, the pacing is typically lightning-fast, as all Rodriguez's films are. He doesn't just shoot a scene; he winds it up like a top and let's it spin deliriously around. I've always admired the director because he realizes something important: exploitation movies can be fun. Too many of them these days get bogged down in affected hipness, or excessive gore. The Faculty, meanwhile, is genuinely hip and, while it does contain the requisite gore, it never goes overboard. The gross-out effects are used in their proper place (as seasoning for the story, more or less).
I also liked the cast of the film. Most of the young actors were unknown to me. Elijah Wood is about the best known of the cast (having been in Forever Young, Deep Impact, and The War). Josh Hartnett I had seen last summer in Halloween:H20, where he seemed bland. As the savvy drug dealer, though, he has found a character he can sink his teeth into. The other four principles I don't recall ever having seen before, but they are also effectively cast in their roles. In particular, Clea DuVall and Jordana Brewster (a former soap star, I am told) do good work with characters that could have easily be stereotypical.
The Faculty has a number of scenes that are eerie, and there are some great scare effects and surprises. But I can't fully explain what unnerved me about the film without giving away an important plot point. If you don't want this ruined, skip to the next paragraph now. One of the film's major twists is that the drug dealer's homemade concoction (which turns out to be relatively benign) is the only thing that kills the aliens. Thus, we get a scene in which each of the six heroes must snort the drug, to prove to the others that he/she is not an alien. Although I don't believe the movie glorifies drug use in any way, it is undeniably disturbing to watch these kids being essentially forced to use them. That's one of the interesting things about The Faculty - it got under my skin with psychological horror as much as physical horror.
I've always had a soft spot for creature features. I grew up watching monster movies on TV, and my affinity for them remains strong. The majority of them are poorly done, but not The Faculty. Although genre flicks are lightweight by nature, this one has style and wit. It's a heck of a lot of fun.
(
out of four)
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