Halloween Movie Week - The Faculty

It's the week leading up to one of my favourite days of the year - Halloween! It does happen to fall on a Sunday this year but I think every Halloween should be a national holiday. Trick or Treating would be mandatory as well as dressing up, we could all eat Pumpkin Pie and drink Pumpkin soup and most importantly of all families could gather together and watch horror films. If you fat cats at city hall are reading this then take note. It has the potential to be as big as Christmas!

In the spirit of things I'm going to recommend a film each day that you might want to think about watching. I'm going to try and go kind of left field with this. I shouldn't need to tell you The Shining or Halloween are absolute classics. Instead I'll go with lesser known, forgotten, sequels or the criminally underrated.

Today - The Faculty.

I'll admit that I haven't seen this film for a while. It actually came out in 1998 - Christ that seems like a long time ago. I do hold a special fondness for it in my heart though because it was one of the first films I saw when I really started getting into the horror genre. I guess you could even question if it really is a horror or if it's more science fiction. I think one of its great strengths is in fusing the two genres so effortlessly harking back to an earlier era and fifties sci-fi like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. It also does a pretty darn good at nailing the teen coming of age narrative with some great and genuinely funny dialogue. This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise given Kevin Williamson's (Dawson's Creek, Scream) involvement in scripting.

The film is smart, funny, self referential and at times genuinely inventive (the subversive snorting of the made-up drug as a way of ending paranoia rather than causing it!). There's also some very decent set pieces, the confrontation at the pool springing to mind. Again this shouldn't surprise too much as Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, From Dusk Till Dawn) directed the film.

If nothing else this film features Usher playing one of the smaller roles. If that isn't enough to convince you then I don't know what to say.

Peace,

Steve