THE FACULTY (52)

Directed by: Robert Rodriguez

Starring: Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Jordana Brewster, Robert Patrick

The Pitch: High-school kids realise that their teachers have been taken over by aliens, who are now extending their grip to their fellow students.

Theo Sez: Year's most presumptuous (and depressingly self-conscious) sequence has to be where the heroes here are debating whether they might be living through an INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, and someone suggests that maybe all those "fictional" versions were made by the aliens themselves, setting us up so no-one would believe it "when it really happened". Uh-huh, so this is the real thing, is it? ... FX galore, occasionally memorable - cut-off fingers slither across the floor like malign worms - and a perfect wide-eyed hero in Elijah Wood, but writer Williamson seems to have mixed up his sub-genres, going from BODY SNATCHERS territory (where the aliens are emotionless, and our heroes must suppress their humanity in order to blend in) to its obverse, THE THING-style paranoia (where the aliens behave exactly like humans, and are able to infiltrate us) with a variation on THE STEPFORD WIVES thrown in (e.g. in the shot of a classroom with every hand raised). We don't really know what's at stake, beyond a generalised Us vs. Them peril - the object is not to get caught, as in a playground game, but what happens if you do? will the kids be turned into automatons, model students, new improved versions of themselves? - all of which hurts this rather flimsy horror movie ; and this has to be the most unsubtle bunch of aliens in the history of the genre (doesn't anybody, like, notice that everyone who goes into the Nurse's office comes out looking like a zombie?). Still kind of works, Rodriguez' gift for pacing very much in evidence, the high-school setting - though under-used - allowing for real-life fears and anxieties to be sublimated, as in all good sci-fi, into potent fantasy (kids do sometimes see their teachers as aliens ; high-school is a place where the spectre of conformity, giving up your personal identity, is very strong). Trouble is, Williamson's heart isn't really in it : he just wants a framework (any framework) for his patented teen-talk and SCREAM-style posturing ("This is usually the point where somebody says 'Let's get the fuck out of here'."). As one of the characters puts it - the brilliant underachiever, natch - "I'm just doing my part in the deconstruction of America". Shame, really.