Review of The Faculty (1998) by Richard C — 19 Jun 2010

For once, the students are actually right: they're teachers ARE aliens. Of course, so are some of the most popular students in school, the geeks, the goths, the punks, the dweebies...you name a clique, they've been taken over. The only remaining humans are a group of groupless teens: Casey, teeny, tiny, classic nerd Elijah Wood; Zeke, the disaffected, high school burn out drug dealer (unibrowed JHartnett); Delilah, the head cheerleader with some semblance of a soul (Jordana Brewster); Stokely, goth lipstick lesbian (Clea Duvall); Stan, a former quarterback on what Delilah calls "a yellow brick quest for a brain"; and sugar-sweet Marybeth Louise Hutchinson, the new girl with a heart as golden as her hair (Laura Harris). They're pitted again the T-1000, the Famke, Jon Stewart, and their fellow students in an unfair fight for the planet.

Thanks to Robert Rodriguez, The Faculty is a very bad movie that plays like a fairly decent movie. There's some pretty glaring plotholes and a lot that is left unexplained, but the movie is paced too quickly to ask too many questions. This is a sit-down-and-shut-up movie, and it handles itself well. Not perfectly, but well.