It’s not a well known fact, but Mr. Movie Jesus Troy Anderson and myself not only attended the same high school, we also graduated in the same year. As the last class to have a cool double-digit numerical abbreviation (at least until 2099), we were fortunate to avoid the ugly double zero of our progeny and the non-unique ’98 of our predecessors. Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately) “Class of 1999 II” is not a documentary about my days at Louisville Male High School, but a movie about… well, let me get into it now.
Sasha Mitchell, TV’s Cody from “Step-by-Step,” is not just a retarded surfer guy who lives in a van parked in Suzanne Somers’ driveway. Before he ever put on the biceps-concealing sweater and loose flannel combination, it turns out Sasha was an ass-kicking karate guy nonpareil. I guess with a name like Sasha, you learn to beat up your tormentors pretty early in life.
Not that I’d ever make fun of him for his name, as he’d kick my ass seven times before I hit the ground bleeding, though he’s never struck me as the type of guy who was violent (or even struck me).
Speaking of beatings, I’d like to clear up something once and for all. Sasha Mitchell is not a wife-beater. I’ve seen other reviews of things he’s in make reference to him beating his wife, but if those lazy hacks would do a little research, they’d see his wife needed to have her ass kicked, because she was hooked on drugs and beating their kids. Believe me, if he was a wife beater, it’d be the sole component of this review (see my review of “Jeepers Creepers” for my take on pederast and future castrati Victor Salva), but as it stands, she gets five supervised visits with the kids per year, and if CALIFORNIA won’t let a woman see her kids, she’s a fuck up.
This is one of those movies in which you don’t have to see the original to get the sequel, because it’s explained to you in the first five minutes of the movie, and it’s not like the plot matters anyway. In the original “Class of 1999,” some government killbots were reprogrammed as teachers to beat the kids of America back into line. Needless to say this works well for about five minutes, then all the robots go crazy. Perhaps the robots weren’t all destroyed…
John Bolen (Sasha Mitchell) isn’t your ordinary substitute teacher. For one thing, he’s clean, well dressed, and not drunk. Oh yeah, he’s also a serious badass, like that slightly crazy history teacher/Vietnam veteran who you didn’t want to ‘sneak up on’ because he might snap and break your arm. Late to class? Get your ass kicked. Smoke in the bathroom? Ass kicked. Write in your book? Ass kicked. Needless to say, he makes “Lean on Me” principal Joe Clark look like Elmo.
You don’t even want to know what happens when some local toughs kill a kid and threaten hottie teacher Jenna McKensie (the lovely Caitlin Dulany and her excellent rack) with unpleasantries. John doesn’t like that sort of thing, as he’s an English-teaching, rampaging murderer with the soul of a poet (and a book of actual poetry he reads in between watching Jenna get down sexually with her boyfriend Emmett [Nick Casavetes] from the front porch). Suffice it to say, things get out of hand as John starts showing what may or may not be the symptoms of love, or at least lust, only to have his nascent robot emotions heartlessly twisted, like a yak’s testicles caught in a box fan.
This movie has all the makings of a Living Corpse Classic. Karate guy action supplemented by awesomely bad one-liners, a hot chick with hotter funbags, and robots teaching the Humanities to glorified prisoners? It doesn’t get much better than this, folks, and even the out of nowhere, Deus Ex Machina ending cannot put a dent in the awesome, bloody, and satisfying spectacle of B-movie goodness that is “Class of 1999 II.”
They don’t really get much better than this, gang. They definitely don’t get any better than Sasha Mitchell killing people while spouting war poetry. This is a movie that satisfies all the requirements.
Subtle Bluntness 