DVD Horror: Cutting Class
Cutting Class
Year: 1989
Score: 10/10
Bottom Line: This is a dangerous place for a pretty girl like you.
Janitor: "I'm the custodian...of your fucking destiny!"
Dwight: [to Paula] That man is *fried*.
At a very Central Californian high school, cheerleading good girl Paula (complete with a lisp of adorability) is torn between her bad-boy basketball captain boyfriend (Brad Pitt--I shit you not) and Brian Woods, a troubled loner who's returned to school after five years of electroshock therapy for killing his father. Good times. The cast is rounded out by standard characters: The Ho Best Friend, the Lecherous Principal, the Batshit Burnout Janitor, the enthusiastic-about-explosions science teacher, the marching band. And then the killing starts.
But oh, this movie is so much more than that.
The Good:
This whole movie is good. Good good, not just good-for-an-80s-slasher good. Both Paula and Brian are likable characters and they have good chemistry (they melt an innocent apple in art class), and psycho loner Brian is easy on the eyes (which yeah, pretty much explains my entire life).
Oh and perhaps a personal favorite of mine, hey look, its a horror movie without misogyny! The victims are equally split by gender. There are none of the lavish, lingeringly pornographic scenes that usually accompany women being killed in slashers.
The murders themselves are creative: death by kiln, by copier, by hunting accident, by trampoline, by math equation, by shop class. There's an actual non-simple plot centered on the complicated, unraveled friendship between the two lead male characters, as well as that age-old trope of horror, the mob of modern-day villagers with torches and pitchforks, very astutely and explicitly labeled. Plus the heroine isn't afraid of mice, doesn't scream when she finds dead bodies and knees the killer in the balls. The effeminate slightly transvestite character not only survives, but totally isn't the villain! HuhZAH! Plus the soundtrack by Wall of Voodoo, is to die for (mwhahahahahahahahhaaa).
And, there's an awesome plot twist. I'm not telling, I'm just saying. In fact, I'm not discussing the whole last half hour of this movie. Kelly, watch your mailbox.
The Bad:
The outfits in this movie will give you flashbacks if you went to high school between 1987-1990*. And don't get me started on the damn marching band.
Because this is still an 80s slasher, despite being a strong, independent female lead, Paula's still kind of a dipshit. She withholds sex from Brad Pitt as an incentive for him to pull his grades up (which just...what?), she allows him to take her key to the student files (naively believing he'll bring it right back), and she blithely wanders around ignorant of the fact that she could have sued both the principal and the art teacher for sexual harassment.
The Meta:
So. Much. Good. Stuff.
This is a smart, smart movie. It's dark and layered and wonderfully self-referential. For instance, the female vice principal is murdered with a copy machine, allowing the killer to create print after print of her frozen, screaming face, which are collected up and tossed in the dumpster**. Shakespeare is told to go fuck himself, because let's face it, slashers ain't exactly high art. And in a fun role-reversal, Paula's father, the D.A. who prosecuted Brian for his own father's death, is shot in a duck blind at the beginning of the movie, and then spends the next ninety minutes dragging himself painfully back to civilization, all torn and bloody. So not so much the Final Girl as the Final Father.
The obligatory scene where the good girl is menaced in her own home while taking a bath actually turns out to be a plea for help, where Brian hands Paula a weapon and encourages her to kill him. And then he watches her sleep and manages to do it in a totally non-creepy way. (Have I mentioned the smokin' chemistry? You root for them to get together the whole time.)
Coming out in 1989, at the close of the slasher decade, Cutting Class serves as a beautifully watchable bridge between all the actual slashers set at high schools, (The Majorettes, Student Bodies, Return to Horror High, Prom Night, Slaughter High) and the blackly comic high schools of the 1990s (Gleaming the Cube, Heathers, Sugar and Spice, Jawbreaker, The Faculty). Heathers in fact, owes a huge debt to this film, as it steals the psychotic loner character nearly intact, wardrobe and all; if Paula had been a little less pretty and well-liked, Cutting Class would definitely have been Heathers' prequel in name rather than spirit alone.
Paula as the Final Girl is interesting and problematic. She does in fact save Final Boy (and in fact kicks the killer's ass all on her own) while eventually giving voice to her anger at the way dudes treat her, but at the close of the movie, she's still caught between Final Boy and her father, which undermines any girl power message as if to say, "Well yes, she kicked ass, but she also knows her place in the patriarchy."
Happily, this makes the movie no less fun at all to watch.
Plus, if you watch with your Meta Goggles on, you'll get the whole subtext about adult life coming to kill kids, and how school can be both a refuge and a prison and oh just go watch it already!
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*Blazers. With shorts. And 3-hole Doc Martens. Duran Duran bangs. Abstract neon prints. Esprit skirts. Stop me when you need to take another Xanax.
**CSI San Luis Obispo? Not exactly quick on the draw in this film.