Cutting Class

I'm amused when I see two movies in one night and they share some crucial aspect that wouldn't be evident without seeing them back to back. A few weeks back, I watched Schindler's List and Warm Bodies on the same day, and was surprised to find they touch on similar themes. Both feature explorations of what happens when human beings stop viewing their fellow humans as humans and relegate them to being "others". Both have people trying to save a persecuted group from another group. Yes, they get to where they're going in vastly different ways, but at their core, both tackle what it means to not only be human, but to see other humans as valuable even if you don't have anything in common. Last night (as I write this), I watched Alley Cat and Cutting Class back to back. Alley Cat turned out to be exactly what I thought it would be: trashy, low-budget, exploitative, and dumb. It was a huge mishmash of genres, hopscotching from action to romance to women in prison to courtroom drama and back again. Against all logic and reason, I ended up enjoying it for leaning into its junk food-level of movie and taking all of its perceived failures and combining them into something more. Cutting Class shares in that aspect of taking a frankly insane number of genres and ideas and throwing them together in the effort of making something greater than the individual parts. This is where the similarities between Alley Cat and Cutting Class end. Alley Cat, with its random, ill-fitting puzzle pieces, stands brazen and defiant, hands on hips (and not wearing a shirt) and says "yeah, wanna make something of it?". It's like Eminem in the final rap battle of 8 Mile; it owns its flaws, and then condemns you for thinking it would be anything more. Cutting Class, on the other hand, is actually trying to take its disparate parts and jam them together, and it insists this is how the puzzle is supposed to come together. But we can see the box the puzzle comes in, and it does not match the picture on the assembled puzzle. Not even close. Cutting Class is about a girl, Paula, played by Jill Schoelen. She's a sweet, all-American kind of girl. She's a cheerleader and an academic. She has a jock boyfriend, Dwight (played by Brad Pitt in his first leading role). A former friend of theirs, Brian (played by Donovan Leitch), has just been released from a mental hospital after five years. A love triangle sort of forms, as Brian is clearly interested in Paula, and Brian and Dwight used to be friends before his incarceration. Meanwhile, people start getting murdered at school by an unknown assailant. If you couldn't tell, Cutting Class tries to be a lot of things; a teen romance movie, a teen drama movie, a comedy, a slasher, and a mystery/thriller. The problems start because Cutting Class wants all of these things to be in equal measure, and for the viewer to take them seriously. But it never actually makes any of these elements come together, or even refines the individual elements. Its approach to making all these genres work together while establishing them individually is like a chef putting all the ingredients that go into a meal on the table, in their raw and unprepared form, and saying dinner's ready. The only attempt at comedy I could find was Martin Mull's character efforts to escape a swamp after having been shot with an arrow. It feels like someone watched the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Eric Idle gets shot with an arrow, and John Cleese keeps misdiagnosing how serious the wound is. That scene works because its short, silly, dry as a bone, and has a straight man being befuddled by a preposterous scenario. Cutting Class just presents Mull -- who appears to die until we're told otherwise a good half an hour later -- as having a series of comic misadventures trying to leave a swamp, as if there's some weird gravitational pull or force keeping him there. Dude sits on a log and eats donuts, and walks upright, but somehow, he struggles to leave. And it lasts THE WHOLE DAMNED MOVIE. Literally, this "joke" (quote marks the size of California redwoods) doesn't "pay off" until the very last scene. That is the extent of the comedy that I could find. The other genres don't rise to the occasion either. The teen romance never feels real, because the characters have no chemistry, and it's not the fault of the actors. Brad Pitt is Brad Pitt, and Jill Schoelen is one of the 80's most overlooked sweetheart actors, but Paula way too kind and tolerant of Dwight, who is a brash, domineering, overbearing turd of a human being, and Brian's relentless following her around and staring at her and invading classes she's in but he isn't puts up more red flags than a Soviet-era military parade. At no point did I want to see her with either guy; she was way above the both of them. As for the slasher element, I don't know what they were going for here. This came out well after the bloom was off the slasher rose, so I credit them for not dredging up the cliches that had been well-worn and abused by then, but by both wanting a slasher element and avoiding the tropes, it feels more like an Americanized Giallo. The killer skulks in the shadows, using stealth and surprise instead of brute strength. It's different from a big, mindless killing machine, sure, but it's not really, you know, SCARY. The kills are inventive, but half of them are bloodless, and a few of them are too silly to take seriously. And, considering that murder and the mystery of the killer (we'll get to that problem in a moment) are at the center of this, somehow, the slasher/Giallo element feels out of place here, like this was a standard teen romance movie like The Last American Virgin or Say Anything, and suddenly, someone decided to put a half-baked Halloween sequel in the middle of it. Then there's the whodunit part of the puzzle. Well, there's really two mysteries, but one of them is only a mystery if you're so unobservant as to not have spatial reasoning or object permanence. That is the mystery of why Brian was in a mental hospital. Cutting Class treats the revelation of this like a huge gotcha moment ... except that it literally shows you, in the first five minutes, what happened and why. And I don't mean in some obscure, blink-and-you'll-miss-it way like how the opening shot of Touch Of Evil shows you who the bomber is, no. Cutting Class spells it out on a close-up of a newspaper headline. So when the movie gets around to revealing Brian just got out of a mental hospital, which is only like ten minutes later, the viewer knows ... but then the movie plays footsie with this information, as if we have the memory of a goldfish. As for the whodunit, it spends a lot of time propping up red herrings, and all of them feel like red herrings. I won't say who it is, but you'll know, no matter how much bait the movie dangles in other directions. When the big reveal happens and it goes into the final chase/showdown, I was left thinking "well, yeah, no shit" and waiting for some other twist. And it didn't happen. It just was what it was. I could feel the writer thinking they'd pulled a fast one, but no, you didn't, sir. Not even close. All of these broken elements come together to somehow make Cutting Class feel less than the sum of its parts, and it's a damned shame. Jill Schoelen's girl-next-door charm and sweetness is crush-worthy and you want to root for her. Yes, Brad Pitt isn't the seasoned performer he would become, but you can see it coming together here almost in real time. The kills are inventive and can be fun, especially since only one of them is your standard slice-and-dice slasher kill. But when the movie can't bring any of ideas to fruition, but insists that it has, it leaves the movie a boring, cluttered, aimless mess. It lacks the tension of a horror, the genuine it-could-be-anybody paranoia of a mystery thriller, any sense of actual chemistry for its romance angle, or any form of comedy, be it light or dark. If it had either gone all the way and amped up the volume on its parts like 2011's Detention, or went full-on trashy camp like Alley Cat, it could've been something. Instead, it's a math problem where 1+1 somehow equals 0, and that's a failing grade.