Andrew Norris is an idealistic
music teacher starting at a new school, Lincoln High, after a break
from the profession. He’s in for a
rude awakening.
The school is plastered in graffiti. Armed security guards pass students
through metal detectors on the way in, but simply shrug if someone manages
to get a straight razor past the system. The school’s biology teacher,
Mr Corrigan (Roddy McDowell), hides a gun in his briefcase and informs
Norris on his first day, “Everyone carries something here.”
Of course, this was 1982, and such horrors were still the stuff of wild
dystopian fantasy rather than an average day at your local American high
school.
Not all the kids are bad though. Mr Norris’ music class is a veritable
haven of quiet studious instrument enthusiasts – including Arthur,
a short, chubby, wisecracking trumpet player with an alarming pudding
bowl haircut, played by the young Michael J. Fox, credited here as plain
old Michael Fox.
Ruling over the school is Peter Stegman, a cocky punk who leads his gang
of cartoonishly evil teen miscreants in such delightful after school
pastimes as drug dealing, pimping and beating up black people. Slathered
in black leather, chains, swastikas and painfully Eighties goth make-up,
they swagger around the school at will, the faculty long since having
given up on making them obey the rules.
But Mr Norris ain’t having it. He almost catches Stegman in the
act of selling angel dust to Arthur’s friend, but he arrives just
too late to prove anything. When said friend, whacked out of his gourd
on pixie powder, scales the school flagpole and plummets to his death,
Norris decides that if the principal or the cops won’t stop Stegman,
he will.
At first the rivalry is petty – cars are vandalised, classes are
disrupted. But things escalate steadily, with Stegman smashing his own
face in to frame Norris. When it looks like Arthur has blabbed to the
cops about who sold the drugs to his friend, Stegman coerces a young
gang wannabe into stabbing poor Michael J. Fox in the stomach, using
a lunchroom riot as the perfect cover. The last we see of Arthur, he’s
gasping a statement to the cops, implicating Stegman in his unrequested
torso piercing. But, as always, nobody can prove anything because nobody
ever sees Stegman actually get his hands dirty, and as a juvenile he
can only be held for 24 hours.
Up to this point the film has been a lurid and exploitative romp through
Teens Gone Wild stereotypes, a sort of Clockwork Orange meets Saved By
The Bell affair, but the dial marked “tasteless excess” is
twisted to eleven for the finale. As Mr Norris prepares to lead his sugary
sweet music class in a public recital, Stegman and crew break into his
house and gang-rape Norris’ pregnant wife before kidnapping her
and dragging her back to the school. Delivering a Polaroid snap of his
wife’s
defilement just before Norris taps his baton, the furious teacher sprints
out of the assembly hall and heads into the bowels of the school for
a showdown with the thugs.
It’s here that the movie turns from classroom drama to gruesome
vigilante slasher, as Norris picks off Stegman’s cronies one by
one. One has his arm sliced off with a buzzsaw, before being shoved backwards
onto the whirling blade. Another is burned alive. Two more are crushed
by a car in the auto repair classroom. Finally facing Stegman on the
roof, Norris pummels the adolescent monster and shoves him through a
skylight. Stegman’s bludgeoned corpse crashes into the concert
hall, hanging grotesquely from a rope. Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids
alone!
It’s all OK though. A final caption reassures the viewer that Mr
Norris got away with his killing spree because nobody saw him do it.
Oh, savage reactionary Eighties bloodlust, how sweet you taste!
Need to know: Class of 1984 marked Michael J. Fox’s second big
screen role, following a supporting part in the 1980 college comedy Midnight
Madness. 1982 also saw him debut on TV in the successful sitcom, Family
Ties, a popular role which saw him through to 1985 and a little time
travel movie called Back To The Future. Although the character of Arthur
is supposedly 16 years old in Class of 1984, Fox was really 21 years
old at the time. The fact that Arthur actually looks 11 years old is
probably why Fox was able to play plucky teenagers well into his thirties
before anyone twigged his true age.
Class of 1984 was co-written and directed by Mark Lester, a venerable
veteran of the B-movie scene who helmed the early Arnie outing, Commando,
and the Stephen King adaptation, Firestarter (see: Drew
Barrymore). He
would return to the high school theme with the 1990 semi-sequel, Class
of 1999, this time siding with the kids and featuring Pam Grier as a
killer cyborg teacher. Lester’s co-author on the Class of 1984
screenplay was Tom Holland, the director of the first Child’s Play
movie, while Timothy Van Patten, who played the monstrous Stegman, is
now a successful TV director with stints on The Sopranos, Deadwood and
Sex & the City to his credit.
