The Faculty (1998)
The very first thing I gotta mention is the actor Josh Hartnett. He appears both in this as well as Halloween H20 in the same year. He later went on to starred in 30 Days of Night, a good vampire movie. I should point out Robert Patrick appears in the movie too. He is best known for his role as T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Even actors like Elijah Wood also starred in this. A few years before he played Frodo in The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. The Faculty is about a group of high school students that discovers their school got taken over by aliens. No this isn't an alien invasion movie. It also isn't quite The Thing style movie either. Although in some aspects it sorta plays off of that.
The aliens in question are essentially parasites that requires water. Some crazy stuff happens in this movie. Obviously both movies with Hartnett he played a high school student getting stalked in horror films. This is in some ways worse than getting stalked by Myers, I thought I would never say that. The staff ends up getting the parasites then more students started to follow.
I do like how they figured a method to effectively kill the parasite. In most drug programs, they tell you don't do drugs. Here it's more like let's give those people drugs to save em from the aliens. At a point, they had to only rely on each other. It brings up paranoia who doesn't have a parasite yet. Not to mention, people with parasites are crazy.
One of them survived a decapitate I'm not kidding. Patrick I felt delivers a good performance in this. I felt the soundtrack does make it fitting for a horror movie centered in high school. It was this movie I ended up becoming a fan of the band Korn with their song, Another Brick in the Wall. Now I know the original song was done by the band Pink Floyd.
I don't often discuss stuff with music. But I will say after I heard both versions of the same song. To me there's slight differences, I do prefer Pink Floyd version a little more. To be fair, you really can't go wrong with either version. This movie partly plays on a similar twist to movies like Scream series. Considering both Scream movies up to Scream 4 & this got released by Dimension Films, that's a fair statement.
I say this because it turns out the queen alien parasite was disguised as Marybeth. She also revealed what she did for the drug test to prevent getting caught by the group. I probably should mention most parasites are very small while the queen parasite is notably bigger. Not only that she swims in the pool a lot faster than a human too.
There is a happy ending to the movie, actually more positive than a lot of 90s horror movies. The Faculty is a movie that has some intense moments. There are some light moments as well. But man the special effects are a little better than you're possibly expecting too. I felt for the most part, everyone involved made the movie good enough to make it a cult classic.
It's a shame, this movie often gets forgotten. I'm not saying it's perfect because yeah it has some notable issues. Like have some twists played out could've been done a little better. Also you kinda wish to see more of how the parasites takes over someone's body too. It's an unusual take on the genre, parts of the concept has been done before.
This is more of an unexpected direction by making it a high school horror movie. There's some sci-fi like how they discuss a drug they created to use on the parasites. No you don't get to see how the aliens came to Earth but their queen revealed a little information on that. You just kinda curious where they came from or how exactly they got there in the first place?
The Faculty is a movie that's just right to watch if you are currently attending high school. It's kinda like if The Breakfast Club was a horror movie in a weird sense. You have an unusual group of high school students working together against these aliens. At the same time, you already stopped questioning that. In the end, you have to work with people even if you don't like each other against a common enemy.
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