The Faculty (1998)
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
When creepy things start happening at Herrington High, the students begin to suspect that their faculty is being controlled by body-snatching aliens.
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What critics compared The Faculty to
The film in essence is abundantly silly, but Rodriguez adds his own flourishes such as casting his favorite actors and combining story elements from “Invaders from Mars,” “The Thing,” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
A meant to be chic sci-fi film, set in an Ohio high school, that pays homage to a number of other trashy genre horror classics such as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "The Thing."
John Carpenter's The Thing is hilariously echoed in a scene in which Casey and his classmates Zeke (Hartnett), Stokely (DuVall), Mary Beth (Harris) and others must prove their humanity by snorting vials of diuretic No-Doz, while lesser genre highlights such as Night of the Kreeps are given their due as well.
Like Scream, The Faculty is both an homage to a classic modern horror movie by John Carpenter -- The Thing, in this case -- and a general riff on pop culture as seen through the eyes of a bunch of precociously analytic, verbally adept teenagers.
Calling it a "riff" on Body Snatchers is, if anything, not strong enough: for the first two-thirds of the movie or better, it's virtually nothing besides the exact plot of Body Snatchers populated by the same cluster of generic teen characters who've inhabited every single teen movie since John Hughes codified them in The Breakfast Club .
This film is a clear nod to both "The Breakfast Club" and the classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", a blend that actually reminds of "Scooby Doo" sans the dog!
Unlike with The Breakfast Club (or any of the Body Snatchers films, for that matter), there is little reason for our protagonists to establish connections at the start.
But, more surprisingly, it also pays homage to "The Breakfast Club."
"The Faculty" is his latest screenplay put to film, and while the concept is slyly clever -- take the kids from "The Breakfast Club" and drop them in to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" -- and kicks up some of his still-hot embers, after outlining the gimmick he wrote the rest of the movie on auto-pilot, pausing only to pack it with his spot-on, stock-in-trade pop culture references.
Here he essentially plugs The Breakfast Club into Invasion of the Body Snatchers and lays an alien invasion at 90210 High.
The fight set-pieces pitting the homosapiens against a circle of rampaging "blanks" get repetitive quickly, while an extended sequence where the guys must prove to each other that they are still, in fact, themselves is like a copycat of a scene from 1998's far more inspired " The Faculty ."
Yönetmen ayrıca, Rodriguez’in 1998 tarihli filmi Faculty’den de esinlendiğini belirtmiştir.
He was also inspired by Rodriguez’s The Faculty, which resembles a university-set version of The Thing.
Coogler’s enduring love for multiplex favorites like “The Faculty,” “The Thing,” and “From Dusk Till Dawn”…
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The homages to the '90s era of self-aware slasher movies, such as I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Faculty , can be seen throughout 1994.
By all appearances, Fear Street Part One: 1994 is a conventional contemporary riff on ‘90s horror classics like I Know What You Did Last Summer , The Faculty , and Scream , period-accurate needle drops and all.
The way horror navigates high school ecosystems will forever provide more room for honesty ( Detention , Scream , The Faculty , etc.), which Freaky doesn’t ignore.
DuVall, just as she did in The Faculty, invites us to remember “that story on the island” that I mentioned earlier just as the coincidences start to get spookier and more labyrinthine.
Spy Kids was written and directed by Robert Rodriguez, who burst onto the indie scene with El Mariachi and proceeded to make hard-core action-horror films like From Dusk Till Dawn and The Faculty.
For someone who has directed a blood-drenched $5,000 indie about a mariachi with a gun disguised as a guitar holder (1993's "El Mariachi"), a ghastly, foul-mouthed vampire epic (1996's "From Dusk Till Dawn"), and a high school-set horror movie about alien teachers (1998's "The Faculty"), it would seem like an odd choice for director Robert Rodriguez to next choose a family film, but that is what he has done.
Spy Kids marks a shift in direction for writer-director Robert Rodriguez, the former whiz kid behind the ultra-low-budget El Mariachi and subsequent violent gorefests such as Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn and The Faculty.
Written and directed by Robert Rodriguez, whose previous work includes the bloody and very-adult "From Dusk Till Dawn" and "The Faculty," "Spy Kids" tells of a successful secret-agent duo who retired from active duty in order to get married and have kids.
In 1998, he decided to jump genres a bit with the less than successful horror film, "The Faculty," and has now taken an even greater leap with his latest effort.
He went to Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein with it and said that if he got the greenlight, he would direct one of the studio's projects, which is how he came to direct Kevin Williamson's umpteenth teen horror script "The Faculty".
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…setup, and the transformation of oppressive adult figures into an easily combatable invading alien force can indeed be cathartic (see: The Faculty), but surely there are cleverer ways to indulge in those fantasies than what The 5th Wave presents.
It’s also perfectly cast, with Natasha Lyonne playing the slightly-confused Megan to perfection and Clea DuVall (The Faculty) turning in another of her trademark ‘moody’ teens.