Class of 1984  ★★★½

EXPLOITATION movies of the 1980s don’t come much better than Class of 1984.

This is an American Clockwork Orange knockoff that also tries (well kind of makes a half-hearted effort) to combine social commentary with ultra-violence.

The defining differences are Clockwork Orange had master film-maker Stanley Kubrick at the helm, was based on unique source material in the Anthony Burgess’ novel and hit a nerve at a time in the ’70s when censorship and freedom of expression were on a collision course.

What Mark Lester brings to Class of 1984 is confidence in his audacious story-telling and tone, pitting two generations against each other to the extent their conflict ultimately becomes completely ridiculous but constantly entertaining.

Lester’s film actually does foretell a future where metal detectors are introduced to American schools as a method of controlling escalating violence, but that’s about where the social commentary starts and ends.

In pitting a teaching faculty, and one teacher in particular, against a teenage gang of neo-Nazi students, Lester doesn’t really have anything to say about the reasons why, other than this particular subset of the younger generation wants to do what it likes.

In this school that means selling drugs, running prostitution rackets and refusing to take part in anything that resembles a learning process.

We are first introduced to Perry King playing a music teacher on his first day at a new posting, his first at an inner-city high school. He immediately meets Roddy MacDowell’s character, a jaded veteran biology teacher who, like most of the other members of the faculty, has given up and is going through the motions.

King is immediately thrown into confilct with the head of the gang that will make his life unbearably and force him to eventually confront them with deadly force.

The best thing about the film’s narrative is the pacing, like a Laurel and Hardy film the battle escalates, in this case from threats and pranks to a car crash to animal cruelty to a classroom siege and finally rape and death.

Director Mark Lester does a serviceable job, as he did with Commando and Firestarter around the same time. All three films have stood the test of time, unlike Lester’s work over the ensuing 20-odd years which has pretty much amounted ton straight-to-video rip-offs of better films.

I have a soft spot for Perry King – it’s called 1977’s The Choirboys which was my favourite novel a an adolescent teen and was turned into a spectacularly uneven film directed by Robert Aldrich. King was good in that and he’s good here as well.

His nemesis is played by Timothy van Patten who pretty much never appeared in anything else halfway decent but has gone on to a solid career as a director in television.

The film is also notable for being Michael Fox’s second film. The year after he starred in Back to the Future…and the rest is history.