Ever wondered what would happen if your high-school teachers were replaced by aliens… Ever wondered what would happen if the guy who wrote Scream collaborated with the guy who directed Desperado for a loose remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers… Ever wondered what would happen if we re-watched The Faculty and recorded a podcast about it… Yes, The Faculty! Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Williamson’s 1998 teen sci-fi thriller that makes The Breakfast Club look like, well… like someone took the characters from The Breakfast Club and put them in a 1998 sci-fi thriller. Does the movie work today? Is Josh “Pearl Harbour” Hartnett charming, or just squinty? What parallels are there between this teen flick and the acclaimed TV series Breaking Bad? Whatever happened to that Jon Stewart guy? Joined by Alexandra West, who writes the horror blog Scare Tactic, we answer these questions and more!
MUSIC: This week’s featured artist is Jay Sad
WARNING: the podcast contains strong language and immature subject matter, please be advised.
Great episode!
I had just about forgotten about this film and I certainly had no idea Robert Rodriguez had anything to do with it. I guess he lost his Midas touch long before Machete!
What I remember most about the movie is that I was working in a music store at the time (ok, the music department of Future Shop) and the soundtrack was a huge seller in spite of the terrible headlining cover song. I also recall there being a massive Tommy Hilfiger campaign featuring the castmembers in his trademark bland khaki. Kind of appropriate to the film’s confused conformity/anti-conformity themes, don’t you think?
Agreed. The movie’s troubling moral (seen both in its conclusion and in these types of commercial tie-ins) seems to be don’t conform to aliens, conform to earth society instead.
That being said, those were some pretty fucking sweet khakis.
Thanks for listening, and for the write-up on your blog!