Class of 1999

If you've grown up with trashy no brainer films like this one and Lesters even poorer effort Commando, you'll love this. Its cheesy, over the top and light hearted enough to make for a great bored night in with illegal substances. The acting is hammy, the direction poor, but what saves this film is the exact things that make is a catastrophy. I mean, don't be expecting "Its a Wonderful Life" or "The Green Mile" when you watch this. Just expect a nice straight forward action flick about psychotic robot teachers. Everything about this film is great, its intense, dark and fun. Its not surprising to see people here have ripped it apart, but with a name like Class of 1999, what did you expect??

Summary: watch it for a giggle, its really not that bad.

Recent teenage parolee Cody Culp returns to his anarchistic futuristic hood to find himself disgusted with his home life, alienated from his former gang(probably to his relief), and threatened by the school's newest bullies: three robotic teachers, implemented by the government to restore discipline, only consolation being his budding romance with the principal's daughter--perpetually gorgeous Tracy Lin. As always, whenever players take the material as seriously as these actors do, the potentially mediocre is propelled to a new level. The performance by vastly unappreciated and underused Bradley Gregg rivals that of the more experienced Ryan, Grier, and Kilpatrick(with McDowell typically good, but all too often idle).

I've always held that the reason there was and remains so much dissatisfaction with this movie is that too many people watched it with the wrong expectations. Preparing for some silliness and expecting some substandard effects is the starting point with one like this. Reason being: to get past the frequent implausibility is to put yourself in a position to recognize the uniqueness and innovation. Taking the deliberate cheese with a grain of salt, one can appreciate opportunities when it is earnest.

If anything truly hurts this movie, it's the boring pseudo-military battle scenes. They would have been wise to leave this stuff to the only films suited to do them properly--war films, but instead have introduced out-of-place time wasters in which neither side has evoked any sympathy anyway. That said, Class Of 1999 is still a shoulda-been camp classic not to be missed. Then again, should any movie featuring knockout Tracy Lin be missed?

You don't get any more hammy than this. Amongst all the trash of straight to video releases, you ocassionaly find a concept like this. A guy walks out of prison, and heads back to school to find that cyborg teachers are taking the code of the classroom a little to far. Schools in many American districts are regarded as "Free-fire zones" and the police won't even intervene in the deadly gang warfare that ensues whenever school is not on. No one ever asks "Why do these kids even bother going to school", but at this point, who cares? This is a gritty view of the future, with the kind of ironic humour that has made Verhoeven millions, if he had directed this it would have been the next Robocop. The cast shine with the likes of Malcolm MacDowell, Pam Grier and Stacey Keach and in the leading role is charasmatic Corey Feldman-clone, Bradley Gregg. Everyone is having fun with this movie and it is this attitude that makes it so watchable. A pumping rock soundtrack including Nine Inch Nails debut single pads this out even further. Great lines ooze from the script; I'll leave you with one of my favourites: "I'm going to go waste some teachers. Who's with me!"

I've got a soft spot for sci-fi films that have already passed their sell-by-date—those movies set in a year that is now history to you and I (even more-so if the year forms part of the film's title, like this one): I just love seeing how these cinematic predictions of the future differ from reality.

Class of 1999 is a classic example: according to this film, by the year 1999 gang culture will have reached such a level in the U.S. that certain areas—known as Free Fire Zones—will no longer be protected by the police. Kennedy High School, situated in one such lawless zone, becomes the testing ground for three experimental robot teachers (played by Patrick Kilpatrick, Pam Grier, and John P. Ryan), adapted from military battle droids by unscrupulous MegaTech head honcho Bob Forrest (Stacy Keach).

Recently released from prison, gang-banger Cody Culp (Bradley Gregg) intends to give up his criminal lifestyle, but when the droid teachers begin to revert back to their military programming, dealing with their unruly students using extreme force, he and his gang, the Blackhearts, join forces with their rivals, the Razorheads, to try and stop the killing.

According to director Mark L. Lester (who also directed the superior Class of 1984), late '90s fashion hasn't moved on much from the decade before, the film's youths sporting some truly nasty attire (worst offender being Joshua Jackson as Cody's brother Angel, who wears yellow leggings and matching tunic and has the cheek to tell Cody "Man, you got to think about your image"). Also exhibiting zero sign of taste: Stacy Keach as freaky albino Forrest, whose hairstyle is a cross between a mullet and a rattail, and who wears zombie contact lenses for no apparent reason (I thought he was an albino at first, but his 'tache is black).

This version of 1999 also sees the art of robotics advanced to a level where machines can pass for human, something clearly inspired by James Cameron's The Terminator. As the droid teachers battle Cody and his pals, they shed their skin to reveal powerful weapons, which takes the violence up a notch and allows for some pretty impressive animatronic effects and gloopy cyborg gore, Grier opening up her chest (complete with prosthetic tits), Ryan having his cranium blown off, and Kilpatrick's head reduced to half human, half robot (before having his noggin separated from his body via forklift truck!).

Gloriously daft, a little cheesy at times, a lot cheesy at others, and packed with cartoonish violence, Class of 1999 is great entertainment for fans of exploitative '80s schlock. The fact that its vision of the near future is so wrong is just the icing on the cake.

7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.

In the 1982 cult hit CLASS OF 1984, the teachers were afraid of the pupils...or at least the punk ones. Eight years later, the tables turned with high-tech results.

In-between CLASS OF 1984, a kind of B-movie exploitation film about high school as seen in Orwellian terms, and its "follow-up" (not necessarily a sequel per se), 1990's CLASS OF 1999, the director of both, Mark L. Lester, had made forays into more mainstream film making with the better-than-average 1984 Stephen King adaptation FIRESTARTER, and the 1985 Schwarzenneger opus COMMANDO. Perhaps knowing that he was not ever going to be another Steven Spielberg (which is a fool's errand anyway), Lester decided at the tail end of the Eighties to revisit the high school theme of CLASS OF 1984. Not surprisingly, this meant reviving the same themes of extremely explicit violence, sex, and profuse profanity that characterized his '82 opus.

This time, however, he took it one step further.

The setting is Lincoln High School in the great Emerald City, Seattle. It is a place where even highly trained Seattle cops wouldn't set foot inside. But the new principal of the place, Dr. Miles Langford, portrayed by Malcolm McDowell (known for his role as Alexander DeLarge in director Stanley Kubrick's 1971 classic A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, one of those films that influenced CLASS OF 1984), has found a way to bring law and order and discipline. He has agreed to have a trinity of former military cyborgs serve as "educators". Unsurprisingly, the end result is typically over-the-top ultra-violent mayhem.

Needless to say, with CLASS OF 1999, we're not exactly talking about anything other than a cheesy bit of graphic, pre-CGI high tech violence. Still, Lester manages to get some good performances, not only by McDowell, but also by great actors of the previous two decades such as Stacy Keach, John Ryan, and Pam Grier, who might otherwise have totally embarrassed themselves. And as if that wasn't enough, CLASS OF 1999 manages to reference, among other films, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, ROBOCOP, ROBOCOP 2, WESTWORLD, and even BLADE RUNNER. What else can it do? It's really nothing more than a higher-than-usually-budgeted violent B-grade film.

That said, as I did with CLASS OF 1984, I am giving CLASS OF 1999 a '7'-it is good for what it is.