Cutting Class (1989)

A would be teen slasher parody, Cutting Class (1989) is today mainly notable for its casting of Brad Pitt as one of its leads.  It was only third billed Pitt's second major film role and to be brutally frank, nothing about his performance suggests the charismatic leading man he was to become.  To be fair, the script gives him little to work with in his role as the not overly bright High School jock boyfriend of heroine Jill Schoelen, (who was probably at the peak of her popularity as a 'scream queen'.  In fact, the script doesn't give any of the cast much to work with and is simply not as funny as it seems to think that it is.  It also completely misses the mark as slasher movie, with absolutely no suspense, poorly staged murders and a far too obvious killer, (despite a desultory attempt at misdirection part way through the film, Donovan Leitch's status as an unreformed psycho is painfully obvious from the off).  The only cast member who is in any way memorable is Roddy McDowell, who makes the most of his appearances as the pervy school principal.

A big problem is that there are simply no particularly sympathetic characters - of the three leads, Leitch is a psychopath out on licence after murdering his father, Pitt is a jerk and Schoelen frequently makes utterly idiotic choices).  Now, maybe that was all part of the script's attempt at parodying the genre, except that in true slasher movies the plot relies upon people being idiots and at least some of the victims and would be victims being unsympathetic, so it's hardly a parody, is it?  Most of the attempts at humour centre around Schoelen's father, played by Martin Mull, who gets shot with an arrow while on a hunting trip at the movie's beginning and spends the rest of the movie struggling his way home, to little comic effect.  (Quite why nobody at the hunting lodge notices he is missing and calls the cops is a mystery, but then again, various characters get offed, yet nobody seems to notice, or care).  Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Cutting Class is that it is directed by Rospo Pallenberg, better known as a frequent script writer for John Boorman, (contributing some confusing and tangled - in narrative terms - scripts for Exorcist II and Excalibur, for instance).  His direction here is pretty flat, showing little aptitude either for comedy or slasher movies.