Roddy MacDowall

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) Taking the Bad Seed cliché up a few notches, Class of 1984 has a teacher running afoul of a few teenage sociopaths in a high school seemingly jaded to a heightened level of violence. (As the date of production suggests, it’s meant as a near-future satire, but it feels like depressing reality forty years later.) Perry King stars as the meek music teacher, with some assistance from Timothy Van Patten as the irremediable antagonist, Roddy MacDowall as an even meeker teacher and none other than a very, very young Michael J. Fox as a bullied student. The film is very cleanly structured around the lines of a gritty 1970s revenge fantasy, with the teacher getting an increasing amount of aggravation and violence, and then bodies eventually piling up as no one seems willing to acknowledge the evil of the teenage antagonists. As manipulative as it may feel, Class of 1984 is executed with a fair amount of skill—it’s violently over the top, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I got a little spark of satisfaction at the very final and predictable death of the infuriating villain. Otherwise, it’s a serviceable 1980s thriller, a cut above most contemporary slashers but not great cinema by any means. At best, you can tie it to the growing anxieties about the Echo teenagers coming of age in the early 1980s and the horrors to come in terms of high school violence. But don’t read too much into it: it’s really an excuse to see violent provocation being answered by even more violent retribution. What else could we expect from exploitation cinema?