The 1989 Slasher Dark Comedy Cutting Class Introduced the World to Brad Pitt, Sucks
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When I meet my maker I am going to have regrets. I am going to have so, so many regrets! But when I die it will at least be with the consolation that during my lifetime I watched a lot of bad movies. I watched so, so many bad movies.
I’ve watched a lot of bad movies because bad movies are my passion. Bad movies are an obsession. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that bad movies are my career and my life. In a perhaps related development, neither is going well!
I love bad movies but not every bad movie deserves to be seen. To be brutally honest some bad movies just fucking suck and are a waste of everyone’s time. I’ve seen a lot of these kinds of bad movies.
On a similar note I love horror movies. They’re great! They’ve got everything anyone could possibly want out of entertainment: violence, someone being murdered and someone doing the murdering. But I will be the first to admit that as with bad movies some horror movies are what I would describe as “quite poor” or “real stinkeroos.”
Don’t hate. I’m only trying to be real.
Every October I get excited about watching and writing about as many horror movies as possible for this column and website. I’m what is known in the business as a “horror buff” yet there reaches a point every year when I come to the sobering realization that a lot of the horror movies that I’m commissioned to write about fucking suck, and not in a fun way either.
That is unfortunately true of Cutting Class, which was filmed in 1987 but only released direct-to-video in 1989. The dark comedy is notable primarily for being the first major film role of Hollywood hunk Brad Pitt.
Pitt is a hunktor, which is a portmanteau of “hunk” and “actor.” Yes, Pitt is, and was, a real dreamboat.
Even at the very beginning of his career Pitt was a beautiful man blessed with tremendous natural charisma and amazing presence. If I might give him faint praise he is far and away the best thing about Cutting Class. It might not be much of a movie but Pitt was every bit a movie star.
Cutting Class stars 1980s scream queen Jill Schoelen, who appeared in the cult classic The Stepfather the same year this was made, as popular cheerleader Paula Carson. She’s the daughter of district attorney William Carson III (Martin Mull) and the girlfriend of Dwight Ingalls (Brad Pitt), the school golden boy and star athlete.
Early in the film Mull’s doting dad is shot with an arrow while hunting. The wound appears to be fatal and I was bummed that Mull was out of the film for good but he pops right back up about twenty minutes later injured but still very much alive and wanders about at various points in the film in a running gag that, like much of the film’s humor, goes nowhere.
The high school is rocked by the return of Brian Woods (Donovan Leitch), a disturbed loner who just got out of a mental hospital after an extended stay for cutting the breaks on his father’s car, killing him in the process.
Brian had what is now known as Electroconvulsive therapy now, wears black clothes and has a creepy thousand yard stare. So when people around the school begin turning up dead he’s the most obvious suspect but the red herring-filled screenplay is full of other possibilities.
Could it be Dwight, who used to be close friends with Brian and shares a deadly secret with him concerning his father’s death? Alternately, could the guilty party be Mr. Dante (Roddy MacDowall), a pervy principal whose signature as an educator appears to be ogling the nubile young bodies of his student body?
Cutting Class spends a lot of time leering at its female cast’s posteriors as they’re bent over suggestively, particularly that of its female lead. If you wanted to be excessively, unnecessarily generous you could say that the film is satirizing the objectification and sexualization of young female bodies in slasher films. Or you could argue, less wrongly, that these scenes are shot from the perspective of voyeuristic characters, including its mystery murderer.
It would be more accurate and less kind to say that these shots have nothing to do with social commentary or storytelling and betray that the film, and the filmmakers, just like looking up cute girl’s skirts and assume, not without reason, that the audience will enjoy these blatant bits of T&A as well.
Schoelen apparently did not like the screenplay and didn’t want to make the film but was persuaded by the impressive writing background of director Rospo Pallenberg, who had previously co-written the screenplays for the John Boorman movies Excalibur and The Emerald Forrest.
It’s worth noting, however, that Pallenberg did not write the film’s screenplay and brings nothing to his directorial debut beyond lackadaisical pacing, no discernible visual style and zero scares.
Cutting Class is less a whodunnit than a “Who Cares?” The stock suspects include the requisite creepy janitor who might have something to hide but the corpses pile up without ratcheting up the non-existent tension or stakes.
I was hoping that MacDowall’s presence would be a nod to his lead role in Lord Love a Duck, one of the weirdest and most audacious films about high school ever made but Cutting Class barely even tries to be good or scary, let alone unique or original.
It’s fitting that Cutting Class is pretty much known only for introducing the world to an impossibly beautiful blonde who would go on to do great things. Cutting Class left Pitt with nowhere but to go but up career-wise but no one could have envisioned the incredible heights to which he would ascend.
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