This movie would struggle to get made nowadays. In fact, maybe it was hard to get it made back then. It's an uncomfortable mix of high schoolers with sex and violence.
There's a lot of nudity, far more than I expected. The violence is technically not as heavy as horror movies of the period, but it tends to be played straight. This makes it easy to cringe.
The antagonists of the story move very quickly from being just serious jerks to being much more brutal and evil, and it's an effective shock.
The story moves along at a brisk pace. The new kid arrives, finds that the bullies that run the school are needlessly cruel. After taking steps to counter their effect, he is seriously injured. And he takes revenge in a variety of ways, killing off the bullies, and freeing the school from oppression.
Now there's a power vacuum, and different people want to take over a position of social leadership.
So, the story does seem thematically similar to Lord of the Flies. This is accented by the strange absence of adults for the vast majority of the movie.
What is incredible is how much this seems to have influenced Heathers.
This movie has almost no humor in it. It's pretty bleak. Even the ending doesn't seem to be good or bad, it just ties up the story without any sense of relief.
I'd advise seeking this out if it sounds like it might be of interest. You don't get to see many things like this.
There's a lot of nudity, far more than I expected. The violence is technically not as heavy as horror movies of the period, but it tends to be played straight. This makes it easy to cringe.
The antagonists of the story move very quickly from being just serious jerks to being much more brutal and evil, and it's an effective shock.
The story moves along at a brisk pace. The new kid arrives, finds that the bullies that run the school are needlessly cruel. After taking steps to counter their effect, he is seriously injured. And he takes revenge in a variety of ways, killing off the bullies, and freeing the school from oppression.
Now there's a power vacuum, and different people want to take over a position of social leadership.
So, the story does seem thematically similar to Lord of the Flies. This is accented by the strange absence of adults for the vast majority of the movie.
What is incredible is how much this seems to have influenced Heathers.
This movie has almost no humor in it. It's pretty bleak. Even the ending doesn't seem to be good or bad, it just ties up the story without any sense of relief.
I'd advise seeking this out if it sounds like it might be of interest. You don't get to see many things like this.
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