Class of 1999 (1990)

Mark Lester’s Class of 1999 returns to the troubled school system that earned him some of his highest accolades, wherein he crafts another explosive satire to very different results.

Following his shrewd indictment of a generation gone rogue in his nihilistic revenge flick Class of 1984, Lester returns to that well and drags it kicking and screaming into a science fiction setting. Where 1984 dealt primarily with the tyranny of the young and the power that the youth hold, Class of 1999 discusses the cyclic nature of punishment that afflicts the young and the inflexibility of educators. Set in a world where the apocalyptic madness of Mad Max seems to have only affected those under 20, the school system marches on aided by humanoid teacher-bots with two core functions: educate and discipline. The conflicted educator with his back to the wall, as seen in Lester’s previous trip to school, is long gone, replaced wholesale by unfeeling disciplinarians with inbuilt fire power. It’s not entirely subtle and, despite its musing on real events of the time, favours a fairly inaccurate hypothesis born from taking the news stories of gun-toting students and increasing gang presence to a far-reaching conclusion. The only throughline from 1984 to 1999, beyond the superficial, appears to be the ever-changing consequences of those that tout themselves as all-powerful and assume a corresponding position, clearly something that Lester is passionate about.

Lester appears to have looked at his two biggest successes, along with the slasher boom of the 80s and attempted to create a hybrid, adding a dash of Commando’s John Matrix and just a hint of Friday the 13th to a pot already bubbling over with social comment. This wicked combination births a fairly lurid and violent companion to Class of 1984, no stranger to sensationalism itself. Following former gang leader Cody Culp (Bradley Gregg) as he returns from juvie to a school at the centre of a lawless suburb in the midst of their implementation of an experimental program replacing teachers with cyborgs programmed for education. Obviously, it’s not long until these robotic professors start eschewing their prime directives and dishing out corporal punishments for unruly students, ranging from severe spanking to forced overdose, compelling Culp to retake his position at the head of The Black Hearts to attempt to rally the school against them.

It is the surprisingly brilliant cast which brings life to what could have been moralistic sci-fi chuffa cobbled together from scaremongering news articles and the remnants of other flicks of the era. At the forefront, Gregg shines beyond his Feldman-esque qualities to provide a likable anti-hero. Think young Snake Plissken meets John Connor, forced – in the presence of no regulation – to rebel against the unlawful. In opposition, Stacy Keach puts in the biggest and baddest performance as the embodiment of the requisite evil corporation and creator of the teach-bots. Those roles dutifully filled by the wonderfully-monikered Patrick Kilpatrick along with blaxploitation doyenne Pam Grier and character coot John Ryan, each turning in a more eccentrically barbarous performance than the last. Ryan (It’s Alive) in particular stands out due to an extra layer of savage glee his character wears throughout, marking him as the most malevolent of the bots while not necessarily being the most powerful.

It’s difficult to see why Class of 1999 isn’t ubiquitously lauded as a hero of cult cinema, it as perfect an exploitation movie as any and contains all the hallmarks of those who are remarked upon daily. Always compelling, its pace and frequent set pieces are such that you are unable to spend too long scrutinising the minutiae of the film. There is no moment in the running time where you get a chance to ask yourself “why are these rebellious kids even still going to school?” or other such narrative destroying queries. As such, it slides neatly into a cannon of late 80s shock sci-fi; It may well reduce educators to their basest of functions and ignore any real motivations for getting into teaching – it is hard to imagine would-be teachers choosing this path purely to apply draconian and tyrannical methods of discipline – but this appears to be an accidental side-effect of the former but the real joy lies in its almost childlike gleeful approach to anti-authoritarian discourse on the ills of corporations and the decade’s omnipresent fears of privatisation.