seriousfic

Now here's a movie that's aged better than it should. It has an okay screenplay by Kevin Williamson (who can be very hit-or-miss... he went straight from writing Scream to writing I Know What You Did Last Summer to writing... well, the next two Scream movies), some fun direction by Robert Rodriguez, and even some actors who are still around today. Plus, it was rated R, full of violence, swearing, drug use, and nudity. You know, for teenagers. These days, it'd be PG-13 and star Shia LeBeouf. Bleh.

Hell, if femslash fandom were larger, they'd be all over this movie. In addition to Salma Hayek and Famke Jannsen as teachers, there's Jordana Brewster from DEBS, Laura Harring from Women's Murder Club, and Clea DuVall from everything ever.

But it's not a classic. Rodriguez always remembers that it's a creature feature and so he keeps the beasties coming, but the screenplay lets him down. Williamson basically tries to do for the alien invasion movie what he did to the slasher movie in Scream, give it a metafictional twist. So while in Scream you have the characters using their knowledge of slasher movies to survive, in Faculty they use their knowledge of sci-fi to survive. The only problem is that this is really stupid.

Scream's premise makes sense. Who hasn't thought about what would happen if one of the fans who cheer Jason or Freddy on as they chop up nubile co-eds went off his medication? But why would aliens invade according to the plots of sci-fi movies, right down to their biology? When one character gets infected, another confidently states that if they kill the alien queen, she'll be freed. Really? I didn't know all the alien invasion movies agreed on that point. Was I just missing the queen alien in Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

It gets worse, as the characters continually speculate on being in much more interesting movies than they're actually in. At one point, the hero hangs a lampshade on the accuracy of sci-fi tropes by suggesting that sci-fi writers actually fought aliens and then incorporated that into their stories. Doesn't that sound cooler than an Elijah Wood movie? You could have an ensemble cast: the leader, Isaac "A-Bomb" Asimov; the muscle, Harlan 'Iceman' Ellison; the team lech, Robert "Howlin' Mad' Heinlein.

Later, the hero suggests that aliens have infiltrated Hollywood and are making movies like ET about friendly benevolent aliens to lull humanity into a false sense of security. That's actually a pretty good explanation for the existence of Avatar.

Anyway, none of those theories have anything to do with the plot. It's just frustrating. Plus, the movie has a PSA moment about homophobia, but it's kind of lamed when you realize the movie doesn't have any gay characters. Kinda odd, that. It's like Friends doing an episode against racism.

One last thing would be the ending. I've heard some people dislike it, but I think it works pretty well. By the end, our rag-tag-bunch-of-misfits heroes kill the alien queen and, by dint of being heroes, become cool kids. The goth kid puts on a summer dress, the drug dealer turns into a football star, and so on. Some would say that betrays the 'individuality!' message the movie's doing, but I find it a nicely subversive twist on the usual 'it isn't over' horror movie ending. Here, it IS over, but even though our guys have made out well for themselves, there's still going to be other kids getting fucked over by the hell that is high school. It's actually a bit subtler and cooler than the movie surrounding it.