Oct 101998
 
three reels

Six students (Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Laura Harris, Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall) observe that the faculty members of their high school (including Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Patrick, and Jon Stewart) are changing, and deduce that they have become infected by alien parasites.

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson (Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cursed) may not have had an original thought in his life, but at least he’s clever enough to state that before anyone else can.  State it?  He screams it while waving his arms wildly over his head and doing a little dance.  In each of his Slasher pics, all the characters and every member of the audience know what’s coming next.  Everyone, onscreen and off, have seen the standard Slashers films and know the rules.  So now Williamson has turned his self-referential sensibilities loose on the alien invasion flick, penning The Faculty.  Like his other works, this film tries too hard to be hip.  But unlike them, it comes close to succeeding in its trendy goal.  Helping it along are a string of worthwhile second string actors and director Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, Spy Kids, Sin City), who isn’t capable of being un-hip.

Constructed as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (or The Puppet Masters—both are specifically mentioned by the horror-aware students) meets The Breakfast Club, there are few of the scares of the former or the laughs of the latter, but there is a paranoid tone and plenty of knowing, fun nods to its predecessors.  The characters are stereotypical movie teens: wimpy brain, bad-boy, jock, virgin, bitch, and goth chick.  But as cutouts, they have surprising depth, invoking sympathy from all but the most jaded.  It doesn’t hurt that the hero is the ring-wielding hobbit, Elijah Wood (he of the eyes-that-can-melt-teenage-girls).

Rodriguez keeps the action flowing fast.  He’s got too many movies to reference to let the story sit for more than a moment.  Since it’s obvious from the opening credits where the plot will end up, it is a relief that he doesn’t try to build an artificial mystery, instead rushing from one homage to the next.  The characters do all their development while fighting or running from extraterrestrials.  If some of it is silly, that’s OK as we’re not given time to dwell on flaws.

I’m sure I could paste themes of isolationism or nationalism or conformity onto the The Faculty, as those infused the films it steals from…ummm…pays homage to, but that would be taking it too seriously.  It has a few nice moments that demonstrate the mindlessness and cruelty of non-possessed humans.  It has even more moments that demonstrate that monsters like to attack teens.  Yeah, that’s about as deep as it goes.

The Faculty is the cleverest and most skillfully made of the postmodern teen horror flicks that dominated the late ’90s.  It works best if you have seen dozens of earlier invasion flicks so you can play along (note the two scenes lifted from John Carpenter’s The Thing), or seen none so you can pretend the material is fresh.