Moviegoer Diary: Class of 1984, 10 Rillington Place

CLASS OF 1984

Plot in a Nutshell
Early-’80s teensploitation about a new music teacher at a lawless inner-city high school who gets caught in an escalating battle of wills with the psychopathic leader of the school’s most feared gang.

Thoughts
Class of 1984 came out in 1982, and much of its genius is its title: by setting its luridly exaggerated tale of unstoppable drug-dealing teenage hoodlums two years into the future, the film suddenly seemed not unrealistic but prescient and provocative. “I Am the Future” is the title of the Alice Cooper song that plays over the opening credits, and in Class of 1984, the future contains teenage boys who openly wear swastika T-shirts to class and teenage girls so twisted that not only do they not mind when their male friends rape other girls; they ask to stay in the room so they can watch.

The title also evokes George Orwell, but pointlessly so: if anything, the world of Class of 1984 could use a few more oppressive authority figures. The principal has security cameras hooked up in the hallways, but he’s a milquetoast who only seems to use them to ogle the female students’ hindquarters as they saunter to class in their short shorts. The main cop character’s duties mainly seem to involve releasing dangerous criminals, and in one of the film’s bigger twists, Peter Stegman (Timothy Van Patten), the gangleader, turns out to live not in some run-down tenement, but in a luxurious apartment with his clueless, overindulgent mother.

Anchor Bay has rereleased Class of 1984 on DVD as part of a new series they’re calling “Cult Fiction”—budget-priced editions of 12 cult movies, mostly from the early ’80s. They were nice enough to mail me the whole set, so you can expect to see reviews of Heathers, The Long Good Friday, Road Games, The Quiet Earth, and many more films of that ilk in the coming weeks as I get around to them. But I’m glad I started with Class of 1984, which is a movie no one would ever mistake for art, but which was nevertheless made with a lot of B-movie vitality. This is a movie that realizes that if you’re going to stage a climactic battle in a high school, you’d better use the shop room and the auto shop.

The cast is a few notches better than is strictly necessary: Perry King, sporting a Richard Chamberlain beard, sells his character’s transformation from meek music teacher to vigilante; Timothy Van Patten (who went on to become one of HBO’s favourite directors, helming episodes of The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, and Rome) sinks his teeth into a wonderfully juicy role, even playing one of his own compositions on the piano in a scene that suggests Stegman is a lot more brilliant than anyone realized; a young Michael J. Fox, still carrying some baby fat, shows up as a trumpet player who’s about to testify to the police against Van Patten, only to get shivved in the cafeteria (an act of violence that director Mark L. Lester stages as if it’s happening in a prison movie); and Roddy McDowall is awesome as a biology teacher who snaps one day and starts teaching his class at gunpoint. (A few years later, Class of 1984 co-screenwriter Tom Holland would later give McDowall his last great role, as an aging horror-movie TV presenter in Fright Night.)

As a Canadian, it’s also amusing to see this nightmare vision of America’s future school system unfolding just off Yonge Street in peaceful downtown Toronto. There’s even a cameo appearance by those standard-bearers of ’80s Ontario punk, Teenage Head—whose four members all graduated from Westdale High School in Hamilton, just like me. Westdale was nothing like the school in Class of 1984, by the way... although Mr. Trussler’s final exams in Latin class could be pretty darn brutal.

RATING: 4/5


10 RILLINGTON PLACE

Plot in a Nutshell
Richard Fleischer’s 1971 true-crime drama about mild-mannered, middle-aged serial killer John Reginald Christie, who carried on a decade-long murder career before he was finally caught and hanged in 1953.

Thoughts
Man, you pop the DVD of Class of 1984 into the machine, watch a teenage hoodlum get his arm cut off with a circular saw, and you think you’re finally desensitized to violence—and then along comes 10 Rillington Place, which contains two of the most disturbing murder scenes I’ve ever seen.

They’d be funny if they weren’t so ghastly. Christie’s modus operandi was to gain the trust of his victims by telling them he was going to perform a medical treatment on them (promising to relieve their migraines was apparently a favourite ploy of his)—he’d tell them he needed to anesthetize them first, like at the dentist, and then hook up a facemask to the gas pipe and tell them to breathe deeply. The method had one important flaw, however: at a certain point, the victim would realize Christie was trying to kill them and start flailing desperately in their chair, whereupon Christie would frantically have to subdue them by punching them in the face.

Richard Attenborough’s performance as Christie deserves a place right alongside Peter Lorre in M and Anthony Perkins in Psycho—three timid little men in the grip of violent compulsions they can’t control. He’s absolutely astonishing, especially in the lengthy sequence where he quietly arranges to kill the young mother who’s recently moved into his flat with her husband. It’s amazing how much work he has to put into this scheme: he has to convince the woman that he can give her an abortion, he has to talk her Catholic husband (a young John Hurt) into approving the procedure, he has to take the morning off from work, and then he has to find an excuse to get his wife out of the house. He’ll never see this same constellation of circumstances again, so when a pair of builders unexpectedly show up to do some work on the building, he has no choice but to go ahead with the killing anyway while they pound away downstairs!

Is it creepy to admit that Attenborough made me laugh a few times as well in this movie? I love his pathetic attempts to show off his (nonexistent) medical knowledge to his victims—he’ll refer to carbon dioxide, and then add, “Or CO2, as we call it.”

I even managed to find a laugh in that absolutely horrifying opening murder scene. He’s invited a woman over to receive his so-called “headache remedy,” and he notices the flicker of distaste that crosses her face when she sees his grimy, depressing flat. “Oh, come in here—have some tea in here,” he says. “It’s much more cozy in here.” He then ushers her into a cluttered back room that looks about as cozy as that basement of that creepy silent-movie buff in Zodiac.

Here’s a vintage clip of Judy Collins and Pete Seeger singing a tune based on the Christie case, sung from the point of view of Timothy Evans—he’s the guy John Hurt plays in the film, a poor, illiterate labourer who not only had his wife and daughter killed by Christie, but whom Christie successfully framed for the crimes as well. A sadder dupe would be hard to find.

RATING: 4.5/5