The Faculty (DIVX Movie Review)

I really amuse myself with movies like "Scream" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" (IKWYDLS). These movies are crammed with young people and déjà vu situations, that somehow manage to evolve in a different way.

The Scream series and the IKWYDLS films, are considered "horror movies", but "horror" is a fast adapting genre, that mixes elements from many different sources and it is harder to define than any other classification. An "horror" movie doesn't have to have blood and it doesn't have to make you scream... all it needs is to shock you, be it through intense (but pontual) surprise, or just via banal situations, that suddenly get seen from a new perspective. This is very incomplete, of course.

The Faculty is a 1998 movie, directed by Robert Rodriguez. Everything in it is quite previewable, though there was a time when I thought it wouldn't be like that... No matter the doubts, "The Faculty" ends up being a great piece of entertainment.

The Faculty happens at a high school, where everyone is utterly violent. Very shocking, believe me! Since the very first minutes, you are presented to some of the main personages, like Casey who you first see being smashed, legs apart, against a lamppost - ouch! In this school, girlfriends spank boyfriends; teachers have to run classes with no conditions (there is no money), and students do drugs, bought to Zeke, a genius that doesn't want to score good grades...

The only person who gets school finances is coach Willis, who trains the american football team. Willis is played by Robert Patrick, better known as the T-1000 in Terminator 2. Willis is the first teacher to be infected by "something"... that uses human bodies as silent disguises for the invasion of the Planet. Yes, it is "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", set in high school.

Casey, the geek; Delilah, the lead cheerleader; Zeke, the genius with a 1968 Mustang; Stan, the captain of the football team, that wants to quit playing; Stokely, the lesbian who was never a lesbian; and Marybeth, who just arrived from Atlanta, are the "heros".

The suspense kicks in the moment Casey and Delilah are inside a closet, in the Teacher's Longe, from where they'll see two of their teachers, attacking and hosting a third one. Shocked, they manage to escape and call the police, only to better understand the real power of the visitors, who had already infected the cops...

The infection is spreading fast and becoming obvious. Many students are now under the power of the beast, after a "routine ear check", at school, called the day after the first sighting.

The aforementioned "representative" students, unite to fight the invader(s), after finding out that Zeke's drugs can kill the bug. This is when you start remembering John Carpenter's "The Thing", because the kids will have to test themselves, before trusting each other...

There will be some surprises, and a fair amount of adrenaline, though you could have guessed that the course that the events do follow, is the most coherent one.

"The Faculty" is very enjoyable! My DIVX version of the movie has some severe problems, with the video coming to a frame freeze status (with audio NOT stopping), requiring a stop and seek of the crash position, in order to resume. These tech problems were boring, but I can live with that....