Cutting Class (1989)

(In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) I bet Brad Pitt doesn’t mention Cutting Class all that often these days. A cookie-cutter high-school slasher film in which Pitt plays a bland boyfriend role, this is the kind of movie that would be practically forgotten today if it didn’t happen to star him. (Not that it’s all that popular even with his name on the marquee.)  As a product of the late 1980s, it’s clearly aware that it has to go a bit beyond the obviousness as a slasher, but the way it goes about it is terrible: it skirts toward comedy but isn’t really good at it, meaning that you’ll watch most of the film dumbfounded at its idea of what’s funny. I strongly suspect that Pitt aside, the film probably plays worse today than upon release—the move of slasher films toward being whodunnits is now de rigueur, and so is the use of comedy to defuse the tension of horror films made for teenagers. No matter the datedness of tis intentions, though, Cutting Class still doesn’t work: even when you can see where the filmmakers were going, it’s simply too misguided to get its intended effect. You would have to be a dedicated 1980s slasher fan to even want to watch this.