Welcome once again fellow aficionados of the absurd to another round of your favorite thing on the Information Superhighway, REVIEWS YOU’LL NEVER USE! This week, we’ll do something a bit unusual, and review a sequel to a film instead of the original. Why? Because this movie came in one of those four-movie $10 DVD multipacks when I bought it several years ago, and I had no idea it was a freaking sequel until I was doing my preliminary research for this column, so fuck me I guess.

To be fair, it’s only a sequel in the loosest sense of the word. The film is Class of 1999, by veteran action director Mark L. Lester. Middle name starts with an L, huh, and last name is Lester. I never liked that. I don’t like alliteration in names, or even using the same beginning letter. I don’t know why, it just rubs me the wrong way. I dislike it just like I dislike it when people have two first names, like Clippers roundball player Chris Paul. Chris Paul? FUCK…YOU, get a last name! Be Chris Paulson, or something like that. Anything, just don’t have two first names! I hate it SO MUCH! I hate you for not changing your name, I hate your parents for having that name, just fucking die!

Anyway enough about my hang-ups. Mark Lester directed such endearing childhood memories as Firestarter and Commando. Lately, however, his IMDB reads like the resume of a director only someone like me could love. Dragons of Camelot? Poseidon Rex? Dragon Wasps (the cover art is of a giant wasp breathing fire)? Sand Sharks? Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon? Game of Swords? Holy shit man, I’ve hit the junk cinema jackpot. Oddly, he’s credited as a producer for all of these things on his IMDB page, but if you actually go to the links for the movies themselves, he’s the director. I wonder what that’s all about. Whatever’s wrong, I’m sure it’s the fault of a progressive.

Moving on, apparently in 1982 he directed a film called Class of 1984. I’ll not link it, in case I run across it and review it someday. By not linking directly from here, I have thereby prevented any of you from being able to access any information about this film on the World Wide Web on your own initiative. But the gist of it seems to be another one of those, “The kids aren’t alright” movies about an inner-city high school overrun by gangs, new teacher comes in and has to get shit done, yada yada yada.

In 1990, still not satisfied that society wasn’t spiraling downward into an inevitable collapse, he trotted the idea back out and directed Class of 1999. Only now instead of an inner-city decay theme, he decided to make it an action movie about street gangs vs. killbots. It was the right, nay, only move. No shit, this movie stars Pam Grier, Stacy Keach, and Malcolm McDowell as The Principal! Well, they all have supporting roles, but significant screen time, even if the titular stars are the teenage gang-bangers (not people in gangs, but rather, people who regularly engage in gang-bangs).

The film was produced by Vestron Pictures & released by Vestron Video, and had only a very limited theatrical release, but really, check out those links. I thought it sounded familiar, and I immediately saw why. Scroll down a bit and take a look at the gems this company produced back in the day. Great low-budget awesome crap like Street Trash (which I wouldn’t have seen without the recommendation of one of the original H&R schismatics, who unfortunately left prior to the website launch) and Chopping Mall, all the way up to Princess Bride and Dirty Dancing! I had completely forgotten about these guys, but reading through this company’s history brings back a lot of fond memories. Do check out both, as the films for the two branches of the company don’t entirely overlap.

So our film opens with some lazy exposition detailing how by 1999, gangs had taken over the city cores of most major American urban centers and turned them into “free-fire zones” where cops were scared to enter (HA, if only! -ed). In response to the crisis not of apparently ceding sovereignty to gangs but of the fact that the damned gangs aren’t going to school, the gubbmint creates the Department of Education Defense. They’re like hyper-militarized truancy…divisions. One would think that it would be a better use of resources to regain control of the cities first and then run the schools like normal, rather than simply run military ops in no-man’s land for the sole purpose of getting kids to and from schools over which no adults exercise any control, but what would I know, I’m not the visionary director of Dragon Wasps.

The former gang-leader of the Blackhearts gang, “Cody” (because badass gang leaders are always named that), is let out of prison to resume school in his free-fire zone of Seattle as part of a pilot program. The Blackhearts, by the way, all have this dumbass little tattoo of a black heart on their cheeks to show their affiliation. It doesn’t make me afraid of them, it just makes me want to help them sign up for HIV screening. Cody acts like he wants to lay low to not violate his parole, but bizarrely insists on driving home through the turf of the Blackheart’s rivals, the Razorheads (this is what middle-aged white people actually thought gangs were named). A firefight ensues, and he makes it home only to find his friends, younger brother, and mother all living in decrepitude and addicted to drugs.

Going to school, he meets the new principal’s goody two shoes daughter, Christie. They bond over his bad-boy image and not wanting to be in a gang anymore. We’re introduced to evil corporate CEO Stacy Keach’s trio of new teachers, two of which are people you’ve never heard of, and one of which is Pam Grier. They’re androids programmed to teach, and to be able to physically handle the violent students.

Well of course since Stacy Keach is the head of a profit-making kkkorporation, it turns out he’s evil and only in it for the money, without caring about killing kids, because hey, what’s a few (dozen) dead kids when there’s a buck to be made? THAT’S HOW CAPITALISM WORKS. You see, the three android teachers are actually reprogrammed military robots, and this whole setup is a test run to see how they’ll work in urban combat environments. Unfortunately when Malcolm McDowell finally gets wise, he gets his throat punctured for his troubles.

So the androids first discreetly kill a few troublesome kids, then for some reason flip their shit and decide to spark a war between the Razorheads and Blackhearts. While this war of many people firing automatic and semi-automatic weapons at each other from like 10 meters apart with nobody hitting anything rages, the androids sneak behind the lines and go on a murder-spree. There is one rather delightful scene of a kid being pulled backwards through a small hole in the wall, snapping the kid’s torso in half. Afterward, they kidnap Christie and take her to the school, trying to lure the competing gangs into a trap to restart their earlier battle. The gangs figure out what’s up, heroically join forces to defeat the androids, and after a bloodbath battle in the school, literally only Cody & Christie remain alive at the end. At one point, Cody also hilariously accurately hurls a fire axe across a classroom. Seriously, like 50 kids are killed over the course of this movie – it’s like Total Recall only with teenagers.

The effects are workable for being a low-budget grindjob. At the end, when the androids are showing more of their robot parts, it isn’t too hysterical. Also you get to see a fake Pam Grier titty after her chest rips open. There is a gratuitous enough amount of violence to satisfy most people watching this who went into it with eyes open for what they were getting. Unfortunately the writing and directing are where this falls short (the director of Commando not being particularly adept? Gasp!). It suffers from something all of the movies of this particular subgenre suffer from, in a wildly unrealistic depiction of gangs, how gang members interact with each other, what gangs are named, what symbolism they use, etc. It’s more like what worried parents imagined in their heads when the first Hot Topic opened in their lily-white suburban mall and they saw their kids with a Dead Kennedys CD, which, as you probably know, bears precisely zero resemblance to actual gang members and activities. Movies pull shit like that all the time though. What bothers me more is that the robots really go off the reservation, and begin making stupid, witty remarks. At one point, one of them with a drill-hand (which seems much less useful on the battlefield than the other robots’ flamethrower hand and rocket-launcher hand) is drilling into a kid’s head, and he says, “I love to mold young minds!” while grinning manically. They’re robots, dude. They don’t get a boner for killing and make puns. The stupid killbots even slaughter their own support staff. During an earlier chase scene when the robots are driving after Christie & Cody after the teenagers broke into the robot’s shared apartment looking for clues, as they’re flying off a dock into the ocean, one of them says he hates getting wet. I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but I really think the whole Terminator approach to killbots is preferable to the hokey-jokey variety you see here.

Also the guy who plays Cody sounds oddly like Corey Feldman. It was bugging me the whole time.

So to sum up, if you’re not looking for much except a mildly amusing way to kill 90 minutes, it certainly isn’t that bad. Christ knows I’ve seen a lot worse. But don’t let the somewhat interesting premise trick you into thinking you’re getting anything particularly great here, some overlooked low-budget gem. Those movies exist, but this isn’t one of them. It’s one rung above a made-for-TV SyFy Channel Saturday Night Special, which is apparently what Mark L. Lester is churning out these days. The real waste is seeing three good-to-great actors slumming it here.

And oh yes, lest I forget: there is a third film in this series. But that’s a tale for another time.

I rate this film 4 psychotic killbots out of 10.