British 90s nostalgia and shite

In the 1990s, if anyone asked you what your favourite film was, you had to say "The Godfather". Because if you didn't say "The Godfather", then you were instantly punched in the stomach. In fact, this still happens today. The only other film you can say is "The Godfather Part II" - as long as you say either of those films, then people leave you alone.

Now, I've seen The Godfather. I've seen The Godfather Part II. These are not my favourite films. So, needless to say, I am punched in the stomach a lot.

My favourite film is The Faculty. Now, I haven't seen The Faculty for over twenty years, so I might not be the best source of information about this film. But here we go anyway.

The Faculty is about a typical high school in small-town US of A. The film centers around six high schoolers: Zeke, the troubled kid who's been held back a year and sells drugs from his locker; Stokes, a girl who's a goth and an outcast who wears black eyeliner and cuts her hair short; Casey, a typical loser/nerd who gets stuffed into lockers for a living; Delilah, the popular but superficial hot girl; Marybeth, the shy transfer student from Georgia with a thick Southern drawl; Stan, the football captain who has all the brawn but no brain. The dropout, the goth, the geek, the prom queen, the new girl, the jock. Together, this unlikely group of characters has to investigate why their teachers are acting so strangely. Like, why is Coach just standing there, staring at me, in the middle of the football field while the sprinklers are going off? And why does the janitor go to the dumpster outside the school every night and get drunk on a bottle of cheap vodka? (Oh wait, that's just where he lives.)

You see, unlike normal teenagers, who only have to worry about acne, the opposite sex, and what will happen when they turn 18 and their parents are no longer legally responsible to pay for their food and shelter, these teenagers actually do have something to worry about, namely an alien invasion centred around their school.

Every alien race needs a cool name (like the Harvesters in Independence Day, the Xenomorphs in Alien, and the Borg in Star Trek). So what are these aliens called? Well, the aliens in The Faculty are just called 'aliens', which is disappointing. So 'aliens' it is then.

So these aliens, they've come to take over Earth, but instead of blowing the front door down, à la Indepedence Day, they're sneaking in through Earth's back door by taking over the bodies of teachers and students in an American high school. It's the perfect plan. They're starting with the teachers (hence the name of the movie), then moving on to all the students, and then I guess they'll take over the world, or maybe just stop and rule over a high school instead.

Various teachers get turned into aliens: the principal; the football coach; the drama teacher; the school nurse. This means the kids have to fight their own teachers, and who doesn't want secretly to kill their high school teachers? The gym teacher's throwing medicine balls at you in the gym with frightening strength and accuracy until you either fall down and submit or beat him at his own game by chucking a basketball into his groin; the science teacher's doing weird, alien experiments and has to be blown up gas taps and a bunsen burner. It's like something from a video game where every level ends in a boss fight. The Drama teacher's hiding in the auditorium, waiting to make a dramatic entrance for "the final act". The Maths teacher's throwing sums at you ("What's 7 times 6?"). The final boss would be the Headteacher, who's grown several tentacles and extra legs by this point, and can only be taken down by lobbing grenades at her weak point, a handily-glowing sac of pus just below her neck. None of this happens in the movie by the way and only exists in my imagination.

Also, the aliens also look disturbingly like penises, albeit penises with teeny tiny teeth and tentacles:

So when one of these penis-aliens enters your ear hole, instead of cumming in your ear or making you go deaf like it would do in real life, the alien latches onto your brain and controls you. It then makes you do a series of comical slapstick actions, like smacking yourself in your face while reaching for a glass of water and then spilling the water all over yourself, like a six-month-old baby. I'd say it's like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers except I haven't seen that film, but if Invasion of the Bodysnatchers has aliens that look like penises, which it probably doesn't, then yeah, it's exactly the same.

Though it hasn't escaped my notice that the plot of the film is essentially Animorphs, a series of books where teenagers turn into animals to fight against the evil, mind-controlling Yeerks. Yeerks are parasitic slug aliens that crawl into your ear hole, latch onto your brain and then take over your entire body functions, including when and where you take a poo. They become "You", while you're imprisoned in your own mind, helpless to do anything but watch as the Yeerk impersonates you and interacts with your friends and family.

Well, The Faculty is just like that. A group of teenagers have to fight against evil, mind-controlling aliens that look like slugs. The aliens crawl into your ear hole, latch onto your brain and then take over your entire body function. It'd be easy to claim that The Faculty blatantly rip-offed Animorphs, except for the fact that the basic script for The Faculty was written six years before the first Animorphs book even came out. So it seems The Faculty and Animorphs came to their ideas independently of each other. So hold off on your pitchforks, Twitter users.

The main difference is that the teenagers in The Faculty don't turn into animals. They turn into young versions of Hollywood movie stars instead. Except the transformations happens before the film starts, so you don't see what they're like before; you just see the Hollywood movie stars.

There's Elijah Wood, just 17 years old, before he started running around in forests dressed as a hobbit. There's Josh Hartnett before he starred in The Butterfly Effect and Black Hawk Down. There's Usher (yes, Usher) at the start of his music career, starring as a high school jock (yes, Usher). And by the way, they put Usher on the posters and on the front of the video case, but he's only in the movie for five minutes. There's Clea DuVall, an actress whose name you don't recognise, but when you see her, you go, "Oh, it's that one". There's Jordana Brewster, someone who looks a lot like Sidney from the Scream movies, but isn't, so forget about that.

There's also Robert Patrick as the school's football coach. He's essentially reprising his role of a T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day: mean, angry, and menacing.

Anyway, the film was directed by Robert Rodriguez, six years on from creating El Mariachi on a budget of $7,000, a film that grossed $2.6 million. Plus it was written by Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter for the Scream films.

Given this, there were high hopes for this film. The producers must have thought they had another hit teen horror movie on their hands, like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Here's what one of the actresses said:

With The Faculty it was like, "You guys, this is gonna be huge. Look at all these successes around us," like She's All That and Scream. ... And then it turned out it wasn't so huge. We thought it was gonna be massive.

I don't know whether it was a big success or not. But I do remember getting my dad to rent it from Blockbusters, watching it and thinking "This is the greatest film ever."

There's a scene where a girl spreads malicious rumours that her classmate's a lesbian. Yes, you heard that right: A LESBIAN. Because in the 1990s, being gay or a lesbian was just about the worst thing you could be, and I should know, because I grew up there. Being gay was akin to having leprosy. Probably worse, actually, because at least having leprosy wasn't your own fault and therefore you'd get sympathy for it, whereas being gay was a 'choice' and therefore being gay meant you were evil, akin to Hitler. In fact, the number one insult back in the 1990s was to call something gay: "This film is gay", "This music is gay", or "That's gay". We'd call things gay even if they didn't have any homosexual connotations. If you didn't like something, it was gay.

Thankfully, the teenagers discover a reliable way to test whether someone is an alien or not: you force them to snort ecstasy. That's right: you get some ecstasy and snort it up your nose. If you're a human, you have a good time. If you're an alien, your head shrivels up and you die.

Taking ecstasy? Killing teachers? These are the kind of teenage high jinks I can get behind. If it wasn't for the fact the aliens are murderous and hellbent on world domination, it sounds like the perfect day at school.

Then there's a scene where a teenage girl walks around the school naked. She's in the buff; she's in her birthday suit; she's totally naked, man. And, incredibly, the camera doesn't pull away. No, they show you everything. There they are, her bare ass and boobies, on the screen, for all to see. Her buttcheeks and her mammary glands. Her titties and her gluteus maximus.

Well, almost everything. The only thing you don't see is her vagina, which is a shame because then it would have been the golden triad of boobs, ass, and pussy, but then again, the film would have been rated 18 and my parents would never have let me see it.

Because this film was rated a 15 in the UK, and my parents let me watch 15-rated films, this may very well have been the first time I saw a girl naked. No wonder this film made such an impression on me.

By the way, if you google "the faculty naked", something I haven't done myself, then there are webpages dedicated to the nude part of the film, such as aznude.com, nudebase.com, and nudogram.com, which I wouldn't know as I haven't done this.

Why's she walking around naked? Why, because an alien has taken over her brain. (The aliens in this film are exhibitionists apparently.) And it's not just any old alien that's taken over her brain: it's the alien queen, the leader. The alien queen has been controlling Marybeth the entire time, so all that shy student stuff was just a pretence to misdirect the other students and throw them off her scent. It's the trope of "It's always the one you least suspect", like the old lady in M. Night Shyamalan's Devil and also seen in The Simpsons when Marge turns out to be the head vampire. ("Well, I do have a life outside this house, you know.")

While naked and under the control of an alien, Marybeth/Alien Queen offers sex to the school outcast, Zeke:

I really like my new body, Zeke. Do you like it? [...] Do you like what you see? [...] Don't you want me, Zeke?

Now, with a name like Zeke, what other chance are you going to get to have sex, really? You're destined to go through life as a loser, the punchline of jokes, the perennial failure. You're essentially Screech from Saved By The Bell. The best you can hope for, with a geeky name like Zeke, is that you create a successful web startup at the age of 25 and use your money to pay for expensive hookers. That's the best-case scenario for a Zeke.

So poor Zeke is faced with a conundrum, a real Sophie's Choice. Should he bang the hot alien chick or not? It should be noted that the alien has tentacles, and wants to put an alien slug into Zeke's brain that will then control him for the rest of his life. Also, the aliens want to take over the world and enslave humanity. But, on the upside: sex.

It truly is a tough decision. But if I was 15 years old and in Zeke's situation, I might very well have offered the alien my dick, while trying to ignore the tentacles and other alien appendages. For a teenage boy, sex is the only thing that matters.

Anyway, is being controlled by an alien slug really such a bad thing? Zeke's made a mess of his life so far — he's failed his senior year of high school and has to repeat it, so he's like 19 years old at this point and yet still sitting in classrooms like a child — so maybe it's time someone else had a go at his life instead. Someone like a mind-controlling slug. And who knows? Maybe in five years' time, young Zeke will be the CEO of a successful web startup after all, all thanks to the special friend in his head.

Handily, there's an easy way to stop the alien invasion and turn everyone back to normal: just kill the queen. You see, you kill the queen, and all the other aliens die, just like how killing the Night King in Game of Thrones kills his army of White Walkers and wights too. And Zeke's discovered that sticking a needle of liquid ecstasy into the queen's eyeball is a sure enough way to kill her. Casey, the loser-now-turned-hero, thrusts the needle in Marybeth's eye, and she melts on the floor just like the Wicked Witch.

The Faculty has everything you could want from a film. American high school? Check. Teenage angst? Check. Aliens? Check. Nude teenage girl? Check. Sarah Michelle Gellar? Okay, there's no Sarah Michelle Gellar. But never mind.

I was at precisely the right age to enjoy this film. It's like the makers of the film went into my head and pulled out all the thoughts floating around in there: high school, aliens, naked women, drugs, naked women who are aliens. All it's missing is Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Come to think of it, some of my own school teachers were so weird that they might well have been aliens. Like Mr. Ormond, my Chemistry teacher, a man so boring that he sent everyone to sleep in his lessons, including himself. And Mr Boulton, a Latin teacher who was so old and ancient that he might have actually existed in Roman times for all I know. Maybe that's why his level of Latin was so good: he was a native speaker, having learned it back in Ancient Rome.

Anyway, that's The Faculty. Like I said, I haven't seen it in twenty years, so everything you just read might be inaccurate. Oh well.