Elijah Wood

Performer for Our Time

The Faculty
(1998)

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The Faculty (1998)
Synopsis

Edward C. Patterson, site owner
Annie Graham, copy editor

The opening credits run now over vignettes of the students, introducing Casey (the geek), Stokely (the weirdo), Delilah (the snob), Stan (the quarterback), Zeke (the druggy). Casey is slugged and we see some members of the football team running him into a lamp post balls first. Finally, we meet MaryBeth, new student at school, trying to make friends. Zeke sells his special happy dust, called scat, in the boy’s bathroom. Casey is in a stall nursing his bloody nose and sore balls. (It’s here that Elijah utters his first screen "Fuck" one of four for this film).

The faculty is changing - drinking lots of water, except for the school nurse, Miss Harper. Zeke shows us that he’s highly intelligent, but is a misfit, the product of his home life. Stan tells Delilah that he’s quitting the football team, which annoys her as she regards that as part of her status as his girlfriend. MaryBeth tries to befriend Stokely, who is into science fiction and is anti-social, hiding behind a "lesbian" label to maintain her space. All through this so-called development portion of the film, the faculty is ingesting more and more water.

Casey sits alone with his camera in the football bleachers. He finds some weird looking shrimp-like creature on the field and bags it just as he’s confronted by the coach. The coach asks if he liked sports. Casey answers: "I don’t think a person should run unless he’s being chased." The coach chases him off the field. Casey brings the specimen to the science teacher, Mr. Furlong (Jon Stewart of Daily Show fame). He puts it in an aquarium tank where it reproduces and bites him.

Stan quits the team as the star quarterback. The coach is unuaully cool with it. In the locker room, Casey is harassed. In the shower, Stan is accosted by old Miss Brummel, who disintegrates in his hands (yuk). Casey goes for help, but the faculty minimizes the incident. Casey is growing suspicious when he sees the coach in the middle of the football field with the sprinkler system on full blast. Casey thinks that the new species would be a good lead article for the school paper. Delilah, who is the editor, thinks this won’t draw. In fact, she thinks Casey is the epitome of geekdom. "You’re that geeky Stephen King kid. There’s one in every school." They snoop in the faculty lounge for a story when Mrs. Olsen and the coach interrupt them. They see Miss Harper converted to creaturehood and find Miss Brummel’s cadaver hidden in the closet. They escape after overhearing enough to confirm Casey’s suspicions.

Casey brings his parents to school with the police, but the faculty has every base covered and makes Casey look like a tweaked out druggy in need of outside help. "I don’t need a shrink. I know what I saw." At home, his parents ground him and even confiscate his porn. "Sorry pal, no more flogging the bishop." He escapes out the window, but sees the faculty in the driveway and is caught by his father. It’s obvious his parents are now converted. He reluctantly goes to school the next day and speaks with Delilah on what’s going on. "Maybe they worship Comets, who the fuck knows," he says. Meanwhile, the faculty continues to stock gallons of water and begins converting the students. As this happens, we see the gathering of a core group of students, who are isolated from the rest—Zeke, MaryBeth, Casey, Delilah, Stan and Stokely.

In the library, Casey puts out a weird theory about alien invasions and as strange as Stokely is, she feels that Casey is off in left field somewhere. They investigate the new specie in the aquarium tank and find it gone. When Stan and Delilah arrive, Casey tells them his theory about invaders from outer space and Stan thinks Casey’s a nut job. "Why Ohio!" Zeke and MaryBeth come on the scene, and Zeke announces: "Casey, the only person in this school who’s an alien is you." "Fuck you, Zeke." All this is interrupted by Mr. Furlong, the science teacher who is an alien and, when he tries to strangle Casey, Zeke cuts Furlong’s fingers off, and the digits run around the room (Cool). Zeke manages to kill the teacher with scat powder. They escape, Casey taking one of the fingers as a specimen. As they run, the rest of the student body is strange, obviously possessed by the aliens. The core group escapse in Zeke’s car as the football team tries to catch them.

In Zeke’s garage, they hide in his lab and experiment with the specimen. It attacks Zeke’s lab rat. He dissects the rat and is able to kill the parasite with the scat - which is mostly diuretic. The parasite thrives on water. The group postulates that if you kill the main intruder—the queen parasite, the others will die and release their hosts (although these teens manage to somehow possess deductive logic that would make Sherlock Holmes look like Forrest Gump). They argue among themselves wondering if one of them has been converted and infiltrated their ranks. They each in turn take a snort of scat and tweak out. Finally, Delilah is revealed as possessed. They shoot up the lab and most of the scat supply as she escapes to a waiting vehicle (huh?).

At the football game, the core group seeks out the queen parasite. They ambush the Principal at the gym and do her in with scat powder (blood, guts and tentacles). Stan goes out to the field to see if that did the trick. In the rain, he confronts the football team as they lap up the goodly moisture. He returns and tries to get back in the school, but fails the "scat" test as he has been converted. Zeke and Casey go to Zeke’s car for some remaining scat and are chased by the football team. Casey acts as decoy and is trapped by Delilah and the team, but escapes through the roof back to the school. Zeke is confronted by Miss Burke and, after crashing his car into a school bus and decapitating Miss Burke, he takes the scat and also retreats to the school. (Cool sceen with Miss Burke’s head running around without Miss Burke’s body)

Meanwhile, back at the gym, MaryBeth reveals to Stokely (and Casey) that she’s the queen parasite, a huge fishy-octopussy-watcher at the gate creature that chases them around the pool and captures Stokely, who manages to escape. MaryBeth pursues Casey into the locker room and tries to persuade him to give up the geek life for one of popularity, as an alien of course. Better a happy alien than a sad geeky human, you loser. He refuses; she turns back into creature tentacular and chases him into the gym. He hides beneath the bleachers, but presses the automated stand collapser as he enters. Just as the creature reaches him, its pinned beneath the grand stands and Casey takes the last scat tube (found in Zeke’s locker, what a coincidence) and stabs it in the eye. "Guaranteed to jack you up." As the creature dies, Casey moans: "You wouldn’t have liked it here anyway." Casey finds Stokely and is surprised a la teen-monster-movie formula, by Zeke who returns (after running perhaps from Greenland, as it took him so very long). "Fuck! Shit!" screams Casey (as Elijah Wood scores 4 fucks on the fuck-o-meter for this film, but only 2 shits).

One month later and all is well. Zeke’s playing football, Stokely and Stan are together as is Delilah and Casey. Casey is on the cover of Newsweek and Time magazine. He also looks cool and in fact, with long sideburns and a hint of fuzz - and a nice soft hairstyle, looks something like Elijah Wood’s current persona and style (in private life). This ends this tale of teenage angst in the days when teachers could hold more than a classes attention and more than ten gallons of water.