Class of 1984 (1982)

January 11, 2023 12:52 PM

Andy (Perry King) is a new teacher at an inner city high school that is unlike any he has seen before. There are metal detectors at the front door and the place is basically run by a tough kid named Peter Stegman. Soon, Andy and Stegman become enemies and Stegman will stop at nothing to protect his turf and drug dealing business.

Also starring Timothy Van Patten, Roddy McDowall, Michael J. Fox, Merrie Lynn Ross, Stefan Arngrim, Keith Knight, Lisa Langlois, Neil Clifford.

Directed by Mark L. Lester. Co-written by Mark L. Lester, John C. W. Saxton, Tom Holland.

71% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

Streaming on more than a dozen services. JustWatch listing.

posted by DirtyOldTown (5 comments total)

This is exploitative trash that lifts the plot from The Blackboard Jungle wholesale and retrofits it with punk rockers as the scary youth gang kids. It's sort of a wild Reagan-era paranoid fantasy revenge thriller.

FWIW, Ebert liked it.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:55 PM on January 11, 2023

I now find myself wondering how closely the disappearance of these "the kids are out of control" type movies, which seemed to surface every few years when I was young, coincides with the emergence of actual school massacres.

Or did they just start disappearing the same way many other types of low-budget films did when the studios decided they only wanted to bother with gigantic productions based on license- and marketing-friendly intellectual property?

Or are they still making and releasing them, just somewhere off my radar?
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:45 PM on January 11, 2023

I'd swear that there was either a website or a book (or both) about 80s movies having teen punks (or kids with punk rock style) as the villains in movies as a replacement for greasers. This also showed up in comic books a lot; Frank Miller was especially keen on it. (The gangs in The Dark Knight Returns are basically this until Batman recruits them.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:07 AM on January 12, 2023

I only know of this movie because of the Alice Cooper song in the soundtrack: I Am the Future .
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 4:50 PM on January 12, 2023

I faintly remember this. Don't those punk kids do something to the bearded teacher's car?
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:40 PM on January 12, 2023