Class of 1984

Forget Napoleon Dynamite. Forget Fast Times At Ridgemont High. This is high school.

In 1982, with the Cold War in full effect, the future looked bleak and villains in movies looked like they belonged in the Plasmatics (see Mad Max 2 or any Italian post-apocalyptic film for proof). Perry King (The Day After Tomorrow) starts teaching at a violent school and, rather than accept the situation like Roddy McDowall (Planet Of The Apes), he tries to change the status quo. Head of the vicious students is Timothy Van Patten (half brother of Eight Is Enough’s Dick Van Patten) and he has a gang of misfits to do his bidding. King is not completely alone, he has a nerdy Michael J Fox (Back To The Future) for moral support, but don’t expect his presence to give the film any Family Ties wholesomeness, as when King decides to fight violence with violence, flesh-churning carnage ensues.

Watching this film 26 years after it was released places it in a different context. Schools in America have become places of extreme violence where students are scanned for weapons. The brutality in this film might seem surreal, but so would the Columbine Massacre if we didn’t know it was true. This film is nasty and bloodthirsty enough it could claim, along with Evil Dead released the previous year and Basket Case the same year, to have started the eighties splatter film avalanche (I am deliberately ignoring the seventies contributions like I Spit On Your Grave). Four years later the Class Of Nuke’m High was released and continued the high school trend, but with comedy, while Massacre At Central High (1976) did something similar earlier. Nonetheless, Class Of ’84 remains strangely prescient for a B-movie.