Cutting Class

For those not in the know, Brad Pitt made his grand entrance into the world of film with this, a cheesy slasher movie from the late 80s. I have to say, much as I love the guy, I am a little surprised that he got more work after the performance he gave here. I have a feeling he was banking on nobody having actually seen the film in question when he put it on his resume.

Given that this came out as the slasher genre was in the middle of imploding under the weight of a seemingly never-ending supply of cookie cutter dreariness, I went into this one mainly expecting it to be total garbage. It’s to this film’s credit then that when it finished I thought it was pretty average. The plot is fairly absurd, giving us a mystery as to who exactly the killer is. Unfortunately, it’s not much of a mystery, as he spends pretty much the entire movie breaking into locked buildings, stalking people, and generally just being a complete creep. And this is without us being given a backstory about him killing his dad and getting electroshock therapy every day for years, or how he looks suspiciously like Cody from Step By Step. There is nothing about him that doesn’t just scream Killer.

This is not to say that there aren’t any good parts to the film, because there are. Our virginal heroine’s father gets attacked while out hunting in the woods nearby at the film’s start, and spends the rest of the movie, and spends the rest of the film doing the most entertainingly slow stagger back to civilization I have ever seen. We also get to see just what kind of school system would raise its children to be murders, with a pervy principal, a vice principal that inadvertently gives one of the greatest arguments against teachers I have ever heard, and a fairly psychopathic janitor that keeps flashing back to ‘Nam. In short, the film’s adults are all really entertaining, it’s just the teens that bring it down a bit. I guess this qualifies as a middle-of-the-road slasher film then. It’s certainly not a classic by any means, but if you’re a big nut for the genre, and you’ve seen all the big ones already, this one will be a nice fix for you.

Rating: **