t Harrington High School, nobody seems very happy. There's Casey (Wood), the dweeb; Zeke (Hartnett), the drug dealer who's not living up to his potential; Stokely (DuVall), the weird girl; Stan, the jock who wants to be appreciated for his mind; Delilah, the head cheerleader and newspaper editor who's looking for a story; and Marybeth, the new girl who just wants to make friends.
Then there's the faculty, who must endure squalid teaching conditions, frustrating budget cuts and the chaos of their charges' raging hormones. All except for Coach Willis (Patrick), who seems strangely calm--and who sure is drinking a lot of water lately.
The first one to notice the coach's weird behavior is Principal Drake (Neuwirth)--Willis stabs her with a pencil, then chases her through the school's darkened hallways. She thinks she's saved when she spots the mousy drama teacher, Miss Olsen (Laurie)--until Miss Olsen stabs her with a pair of scissors.
But the next day, Principal Drake is back as if nothing happened. And Miss Olsen doesn't seem as mousy anymore. Meanwhile, Casey has found some kind of odd chrysalis on the football field. He takes it to the biology teacher, Mr. Furlong (Jon Stewart), who discovers that the thing comes alive in water, replicates on its own, and has nasty teeth.
Later, Casey and Delilah, snooping for a story in the faculty lounge, hide in the closet when Willis and Olsen show up unexpectedly. The two students watch in horror as the coach and the drama teacher attack Nurse Harper (Salma Hayek) and insert some kind of creature into her ear. They are discovered, and narrowly escape. But when Casey returns with the police and his parents, everything is normal and no one believes him. That's when Casey starts to get very paranoid. Talking it over with Stokely, an SF aficionado, she reminds him of the scenarios of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Puppetmasters. Could this be happening at Harrington High?
Taking the other students into his confidence, Casey soon confronts gruesome confirmation of his fears. Meanwhile, the rest of the faculty--and the students--seem to be undergoing odd changes to their personalities...
These teachers don't pass
The Faculty is based on a screenplay by Kevin Williamson, who has already made a name for himself with post-modern reinventions of slasher films (Scream) and teen drama (Dawson's Creek). With his latest film, he takes on the hoary conventions of the SF invasion story, updated with the usual 1990s cultural references and a subtext of teen angst and adolescent alienation.
Under the direction of Robert Rodriguez--known for his kinetic Mariachi movies as well as the lurid horror film From Dusk Till Dawn--The Faculty explicitly attempts to reinterpret the paranoid films of the 1950s, including The Thing and the original Body Snatchers. But despite the stellar talent behind the camera, and some fine acting by an impressive cast, The Faculty rates barely a passing grade.
Much of the film's early going painstakingly sets up the various problems bedeviling the attractive students--a setup that doesn't much pay off in the last act. In the 1950s, the pods that took over individuals were seen as metaphors for the creeping soulless conformity of the time, as well as growing fear of outsiders (i.e. communists). The Faculty updates this device as a way to comment on the desire by lonely teens to belong, to be understood, and to break out of their rigid typecasting. But does that necessarily mean the loss of soul? At the end, one character rejects the siren call of being something greater than himself: "I'd rather be afraid," he says. Doesn't seem like much of a choice.
Beyond the big themes, the film feels overly familiar; fans of the genre will recognize bits from movies as diverse as The Breakfast Club, Disturbing Behavior and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. None of the characters rises above caricature, as when Delilah tells Casey: "You're that geeky Stephen King kid--there's one of you in every school." Similarly, the teachers are either repressed spinsters, naive idealists or cynical alcoholics.
On a side note, viewers who were put off by Rodriguez's direction of Dusk will object to the occasional heavy hand here as well, particularly an overuse of hand-held camera and sequences that are so dark as to be indecipherable.
