Mar 02 2009
B+ Movie Review: Cutting Class
Not every movie is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Not every part is Achilles from
Troy. And not every actor is Brad Pitt.
But would Brad Pitt still be a good actor without the amazing roles he’s been offered?Let’s take a look at 1989’s Cutting Class to answer that, shall we?
One of Pitt’s first starring roles, Cutting Class is a slasher flick centered around a high school, a small (ever decreasing) circle of friends and their teachers. We start with Paula, a young girl who follows all the rules including the one about the heroine in a horror movie being a virgin if she wants to live. We have her slutty gal pal (who practically has “stab me” embroidered on her cheerleader uniform), a lascivious principal (played by Roddy McDowell), a lascivious gym teacher, a lascivious art teacher and Paula’s hot-but-dickish boyfriend, played by the young Mr. Pitt. Also, we have Brian, a dark and mysterious lad who was just released from a mental institution after spending 5 years there for killing his father.
Paula’s dad (played by comedian Martin Mull of Roseanne) goes off for a week for a duck hunt. Before we’ve hit five minutes from the opening credits, dad finds himself face down in the water with an arrow in his chest. He spends the rest of the movie walking this off and outside of a couple of attempts at comic relief turns out to be mostly irrelevant to the picture. Well, except that he’s the DA that put our patricidal mystery man in the nuthouse. Pitt’s character is a jerk, a troubled jock who has a problem with Brian flirting with Paula from afar, (an accpeptable behaviour in the 80’s that we now call stalking). Pitt’s character also has a problem with all of his teachers. For that matter, so does mystery man Brian. When they start dying in varied and painful ways, the question comes; is Pitt’s pretty boy secretly a maniac or is the mystery man really the nutjob they say he is? Which one is a killer and which one is just tragically misunderstood?
The skeleton of this movie is made up entirely of cliché’s. Pitt’s character drives a red convertible. The mystery man wears all black. The school janitor is creepy. Every man in town seems to lie awake at night lusting after the female lead, not her busty and willing friend. (I guess virgins are a commodity in this town or it may be that they know that the wages of sin in horror movies are death before the middle of the flick.)
Cutting Class sucked in ways that other movies can only aspire to. It had erratic pacing, ridiculous characters and seemed always just on the edge of looking at the camera and laughing at the viewer for letting themselves continue watching. I’ve seen parking meters counting down that were more suspenseful and frames of bowling that were more shocking. Most of the acting sucks out loud, which is why the only three names I’ve mentioned specifically were the actors that we already knew were good. Out of those three, Pitt manages to distinguish himself despite this framework of garbage and poor choices.
His character has a few moments of sympathy and regret to break up the monotony of him being a complete douchebag. In those moments, you can see the threads that would eventually come together in the tapestry of his career. Those glimmers are subtle and fleeting and I’m imagining if you had seen this on opening night, you’d have likely missed them. Having now watched the man’s talent come to maturity, the adolescent bits are far more obvious.
The creepy janitor says at one point “Where there’s Art, there’s Dirt.” I don’t think the writers were really trying to be deep and reflective, but they proved their point by putting this wheelbarrow of refuse on the screen. That said, it’s lowly, dirty charcoal that eventually turns into diamonds and Pitt was that diamond. If you wanted to watch Cutting Class for Pitt’s performance, I say go for it. Just get this one off of cable, do not actually pay money to see it and keep the remote at hand for fast forwarding through the copious lame bits.
Because not even the presence of the man who would later sleep with Angelina Jolie raises this movie any higher than a D . Class dimissed.
