During a time when Scream imitators are appearing as frequently as pod people, Robert Rodriguez, with the aide of Kevin Williamson’s wry postmodern pen, makes the best of contractual obligation by merging Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers with John Carpenter’s The Thing in order to, as did his predecessors, examine the philosophy, psychology, and sociology of conformity.
Herrington High is an Ohio school in which the students believe their teachers to be aliens. The only problem is that they might be right.
Even though The Faulty knowingly sits on the shoulder of giants, Rodriquez avoids the novice mistake of attempting to usurp or even equal the efforts of his predecessors. Instead, the director wisely uses the opportunity to fashion a solid B-movie production. This allows the young filmmaker to incorporate whichever elements of his forerunner’s films that serve his purposes while alleviating himself of the burden to provide the proverbial match to Superman. With that, Rodriguez takes Carpenter’s Lovcraftian paranoia and merges it with Siegel’s critique of herd mentality to produce a fun, rebellious post-Scream cinematic romp.
Cleverly, it is through Carpenter that Rodriguez brings us to Siegel. Tentacled shadows literally loom over the proceedings in much the same manner as In the Mouth of Madness but, more importantly, Lovecraft’s paranoia is epitomized once more in yet another homo sapien litmus, not by way of searing blood, à la The Thing, but a mandatory drug test in which students, instead of urinating in plastic cups, are obligated to take “scat,” a intentionally poorly-veiled Hollywoodized cocaine-cum-crystal meth home-brewed concoction. What results is a subversive inversion of what teens are told never to do. However, instead of being sophomorishly cheeky, the manner and circumstance in which Rodriguez establishes the risqué scenario is admirably subversive and is second only to the director’s stunning philosophical consistency in respect to his iconoclastic agenda. Knowing that he cannot goad alternative perspectives while inside the group, Rodriguez steadfastly issues a premise in which groupthink is the enemy, thereby validating any and all socially counterintuitive measures, rules which any other standardized storyline would otherwise be forced to oblige.
Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the crux of Rodriguez’s grudge lies in the constrictive, identity-stealing social duty that is conformity. However, such appears in the guise of civility. What better place to reestablish Siegel’s idea than the socially hyperaware setting of high school? This is where our director pushes the envelope first and foremost as The Faculty’s threat is initially derived from the teachers of Herrington. Thus, from the beginning, Rodriguez gives us high school instructors, who undoubtedly champion free thought, in speech but not in action, which literally demand their students to be like them. Interestingly, during a time when alternative music is becoming the mainstream, we are then presented with a star football captain, Stan Rosado (Shawn Hatosy), who opts to quit athletics to focus upon academics. Of course, never one to miss the open door labeled irony, Rodriguez has Stan rejoin the “team” in more ways then one by feature’s end, yet it is through the outsider that Rodriquez pauses, not to rib, but earnestly examine the theoretical validity of individuality.
“You are all individuals!” John Cleese claims to the masses in Terry Jones’s Life of Brian, before one lone voice retorts, “I’m not,” and so goes The Faculty, a film whereby being part of the fringe carries as many demands as being one of the proverbial in-crowd. As such, Stokely “Stokes” Mitchell (Clea DuVall) expends as much, if not more, effort attempting to remove herself from the status quo, to the point of labeling herself a lesbian though she’s straight, in hopes of further distancing herself from her classmates.
Many critics complain that The Faculty is merely a postmodern rehash of the standard, rote horror film, replete with typecast characters. However, such critics seem to be missing Rodriguez’s agenda in much the same manner they do with Carpenter’s work where identity is relative or explicitly missing. In The Faculty, stereotypes in both directions become unavoidable, and the either/or logistic dilemma deliberately leaves no gray area in which character development can blossom. As such, the wry, less-than-subtle act of naming a scandal-mongering reporter “Profitt” (Jordana Brewster) and the principal “Drake” (Bebe Neuwirth)–in reference to the Drake Equation, is anything but moot. Equally lambasted is Williamson’s trademark postmodern awareness, which renders direct and indirect citations of Ridley Scott’s Alien by way of Sigourney Weaver, X-Files, Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, Ronald Emmerich’s Independence Day, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black, and Steven Spielberg’s E.T. as well as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yet, in an age when teens are aware, either consciously or intuitively, of the paradox of individuality, such self-referential attentiveness becomes a thematic compliment rather than a repetition.
Robert Rodriquez’s The Faculty, aside from being a Who’s Who of up-and-coming actors, is a refreshing jibe at society while being a little brother, rather than a blank-faced clone, to two godfather features of film. Masterfully, the director unfalteringly navigates between camp and misapplied seriousness in order to create his social and aesthetic satire and, in so doing, fashions a picture which gives its audience more than one reason to second guess what your teachers told you. If nothing else, how can one not love a film which tells a haggard drama teacher, who is begging for funds, to “Use last year’s set from ‘Our Town’”?
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
