1998 must be on my mind (see my recent "Sphere" thread) for a reason...
That was the year I decided write my first screenplay. Hooray for nostalgia. I was 18...young, dumb, and full of cum, and a just deflowered virgin.
I was heavily into Kevin Williamson (for reviving the horror genre, snappy dialogue) and Robert Rodriguez (for making "the dream" seem possible for upstarts without connections) at the time. I had just discovered independent and foreign cinema, but was still a confirmed Hollywood genre film freak and ate up even the most misguided attempts.
The Faculty is one of those attempts. It's not the best example of what either of these guys can do on their own, but together, they made something pretty cool. An unabashedly vulgar, hard core, angsty and witty sci-fi horror thriller where the teens actually look like high schoolers and not 27 year old adults.
The Faculty takes alot of cues from Carpenter's The Thing (of which Rodriguez is obviously a fan...he even recues some of Morricone's score for the Zeke's lab scene), and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
I believe this is also the big screen debut of Harry Knowles. This was right around the time I started reading aicn, before the troll invasion...or maybe it was always filled with the little creatures. Thankfully he has only one line and very little screen time. He's terrible (and fat).
Speaking of big screen debuts, Usher Raymond makes his first appearance in a film, and even replaces the actor who played Stan on the poster...which is odd, considering Usher has very little screen time in comparison to Stan, and he's not even really a main character. You can tell his casting was just an opportunity to shoehorn in a black pop star to lure the urban audience to a decidedly white washed film.
The acting is solid for a horror flick. Elijah Wood and Josh Hartnett are the two actors who pretty much control the two pronged tone of this flick. Wood's plays the paranoid, ostrcized geek who is up on the macabre happenings at the school with great skill. While Hartnett reinforces the film's, vulgar, cynical, hard edge in his portrayal of loner-by-choice, Zeke. It's pretty cool how both these characters are loners, but for different reasons. Clea DuVall channels the film's meta-horror-movie satirical elements, and everyone else is just sort of...there. Not that they're bad, but they're pretty much stock characters among the other more unique elements of the movie. Jordana Brewster the hot chick, Shawn Hatosy, the jock, and Laura Harris, the new girl (who obviously turns out to be the queen).
This is one of those guilty pleasures I like to revisit every now and again to remind myself that I used to have fun at the movies before I turned into a bitter, cynical film snob.
