Movie Crush Monday: Little C and The Faculty

Readers, we owe you a small apology. We have not been the best bloggers in the 'sphere of late. I promise that this week is back to normal starting today with my Movie Crush post. Having said that, as soon as we made this descision we also decided to go to a three hour long play this evening so I am coming in right on the wire with this one. But we're back and we're ready to go, so I am following Clea Duvall from Argo to one of my long time favorite horror films, The Faculty.



OK, so once upon a time a little Little C had a gigantic crush on Josh Hartnett. I feel no shame for this, as apart from compelling me to watch a few truly horrid indie films, also got me to sit down and watch The Faculty. And thus my deep love for self aware horror was born. The idea that we are watching a group of teenagers dealing with an alien invasion who have read Invasion of the Body Snatchers is when the culture started to shift in horror towards a smart and informed group of characters. Scream came out a few years before this one and gave us villains who know they're in a scary movie, forever altering the landscape of modern horror. The Faculty is a little different in it's approach to the same idea, in that the monster learns and becomes aware at the same rate as the rest of the characters. Sorry. Spoilers, kinda. 

Elijah Wood hasn't aged since 1998. Bastard. 

I love the parasitic mind control brand of horror movies. It's really the only alien movies I enjoy since the ones that take place in space give me major panic attacks. Throw in a subtle metaphor about high school brainwashing kids and this is pretty much the film highlight of my 6th grade year. Also there's a delightful scene which features all of the main characters sitting around doing drugs for complicated plot adjascent reasons but the best part of the film is little Elijah Wood tweeking and mocking the rest of the cast as they attempt to take the rest of the scene seriously. 



Robert Rodriguez is fairly underrated as a director, in my humble opinion. Sure, he has a tendency to go right off the rails as though the rails were intended for someone else entirely, but he's creative and weird in a way that I consistently really dig. So his version of a horror movie also steps right over the line. The dialogue is bigger and more obnoxious and the gags are grosser but the end result is this really funny really tense movie that manages at times to be genuinely scary. And as with the best horror movies, it also manages a little social commentary at the same time. 

Amen, Mr. Frodo

Happy Watching,
Little C

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