The Teacher

I’m somewhat at a loss as to what to categorize this film as. I’m sure as hell not about to create an exploitation tag for it, since that would cover roughly nine-tenths of the films I review. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have nearly enough nudity in it to qualify as porn, and the thriller sequences within it come way too few and far between to allow me to call it that. I guess it’s stuck as a romance then, by default, even if it’s a fairly lame one.

The plot, as one might guess from the title, concerns a hot young teacher that makes it her mission to spark up a romance with one of her muscular students. This is complicated by how irritatingly uncomfortable he gets around her, to the point where we start to assume that he’s holding out for the attentions of one of her male colleagues. There’s also the problem of how, at the start of the movie, he had accidentally killed his close friend (they were fighting for control of a pair of binoculars to spy on the teacher with, and his friend fell off of the factory they were standing on), and his friend’s insane brother now wants to kill him with a bayonet.

Does this all sound like it could have been a good, or at least amusing, movie? It does, honestly, at least to me, but the good bits come few and far between, and what we mostly deal with is a good hour of padding in a 90 minute long movie. What we pretty much get is a long scene of parents talking, then the teacher showing a breast briefly, then a long scene of people walking around and talking, then the crazy brother shows up pointing a bayonet and threatening to kill one character, then another long stretch where nothing happens… The filmmakers clearly had no idea how to make a full feature out of this story, or simply didn’t care enough so long as something interesting happened every ten minutes or so to keep people from leaving the theater or drive-in. It’s a definite letdown after the comparative entertainment that was Pick-Up (its double feature on the first disc), but I’m going to try to remain cautiously – some might say foolishly – optimistic that the rest of the set will yield somewhat better results. And if not, hey, it’s ten bucks for eight movies, can’t go too wrong with that, right?

Rating: *