Oh why oh why did I not see
this film when I was, say, fourteen or fifteen? I might have truly loved it then, watched it over and over and memorized every line. Now I was merely fascinated by it's bizarro twist and turns and the absurd grandiosity of its ambition. I was laughing out loud at some moments (the whole "eskimo" business is amazing), shaking my head at how far they were pushing the boundaries of logic in others.
I don't think any movies get dated as quickly as high school movies. It's the need to differentiate between the popular people and the geeks, I suppose. We have to see who belongs to which group right away, but while geeks look more or less the same throughout the decades, the popular kids go through at least one fad every year. This is so clearly an 80's movie, with the shoulder pads and big hair, it's a little bit of a distraction.
But I shouldn't whine. I can't think of any high school movie so deliberately strange and dark, so
nasty. The only one in recent memory that comes close is "mean girls", which has a similar trio of "heathers" at its center. I loved the baby-faced and totally psycho Christian Slater here (admittedly, when do I
not love Christian Slater, but that's another story), with his ambition to destroy society by destroying the high school he sees as a representative of it. I even liked Winona Ryder: her character is not very consistent, but the look on her face as she stands straight at the end, like the action hero at the end of a film,bruised, bleeding, and blackened by smoke but triumphant, is priceless.
Too bad I've grown to realize high school's not that important or representative, after all...
Originally posted on:
As cool as a Fruitstand