Director: Michael Miller
Cast: Gerrit Graham, Michael Lerner, Misty Rowe

We all have in our minds many memories of things, and it's interesting to think about how we process the incidents that make us remember them to some degree. As you have probably guessed, some of my favorite memories are of movies. Certainly, some of those good memories of movies are of movies that happen to be very good; it's been years since I have watched the excellent movie Your Three Minutes Are Up, but I have been able to pretty much remember all of what happened in the movie. But I also have pleasant memories of watching movies that really weren't all that good; in my review of Treasure Of The Four Crowns, I mentioned that when I first saw the movie as a child it got me really pumped up, but when I rewatched it as an adult I realized it really wasn't that good at all. However, I still greatly remember the happy feeling I got when watching the movie as a child, and I hold on to that feeling. Those two examples I feel illustrate some of the interesting ways that people deal with happy memories. It's equally interesting to look at the ways people deal with bad memories. Again looking at the world of movies, I'll give you a few examples as to how bad movies have made me process them in my mind. Years ago, I reviewed the awful movie Amanda And The Alien, though when I reread my review today I find I am hard pressed to have any memories of the movie and its awfulness; I have somehow blocked out of my mind the trauma I suffered watching the movie. On the other hand, Troll 2 was also mind-boggling awful, but I can recall the movie quite clearly today - probably because the awfulness of the movie was so unintentionally hilarious that I wanted to hold on to the memory of the awfulness that made me laugh so much.

But I want to put aside temporarily the subject of movies and talk about the memories we have of a common experience almost all of us went through. The memories I am talking about are our memories of going through high school. From what I have observed from many people over the years, it seems that the majority of people don't look back on their years in high school all that fondly. I certainly don't. Certainly, there were the demands of school work from all the classes you had to take, and with the knowledge that how you performed at that work could make the difference as to what direction you would go after graduation. But there were also cliques, bullies, rotten cafeteria food, and a number of other things that made the high school experience unenviable. So I don't understand why there are a lot of adults who look back at their high school years fondly. It might be due to what I experienced with Amanda And The Alien, that the really bad things about the experience the former high schoolers had were blocked out of their mind because they would be so painful to recollect. Whatever the reason or reasons may be, these people all the same seem willing to travel back to their high school years later for class reunions. I have never understood why former high school students seem so gung ho for class reunions. It's not just that you risk bringing up bad memories of high school that you've long suppressed. You are also presenting your present self to your former classmates, comparing how you turned out to be with how they turned out to be. That may be fine if you are a millionaire, but if you haven't had great success like that, you might find that your former classmates did much better with their lives that you did.

Those risks I have just mentioned are just a few of the reasons why I swore after high school graduation that I would never attend a high school reunion. To tell the truth, I don't even know if there was a reunion at all ten years later or any other time. If there had been one and I had got word about it, the only thing that could have got me to attend would be to pull off some kind of revenge against my mostly stuck-up and unkind former classmates, like showing success that I had achieved after high school. Maybe some darker kind of revenge, though I would of course have to be careful since I wouldn't want to be arrested. This is the main reason why National Lampoon's Class Reunion appealed to me when I found it in a thrift store, because its premise promised one disgruntled former high school student getting the ultimate revenge against his former classmates. Of course, being released under the National Lampoon brand, it promised to also be a comedy, and I was intrigued as to how laughs and horror would be mixed to either good or bad effect. The movie takes place in then present day 1982, and concerns the class of 1972 that graduated from Lizzie Borden High School (ha ha ha). Since ten years has passed, that means it's time for a class reunion, and the former students travel to their former high school for a celebration. What they don't know is that former student Walter (Blackie Dammett, The Boys Next Door), who has for the past ten years been confined in a mental institution after being traumatized by a prank played on him by his classmates, has just escaped. Walter evades the authorities and manages to get to L.B.H.S., with one thing on his mind - bloody revenge.

Probably the most interesting aspect to National Lampoon's Class Reunion is the fact that its screenplay was written by the legendary John Hughes, who had earlier written articles for the National Lampoon magazine. However, he later more or less disowned this Hollywood movie debut of his, claiming that his original script had been butchered by several uncredited rewriters after he handed it in. Despite knowing this fact before watching the movie, I still wondered if there would be anything "John Hughesy" in the finished product. Well, there really wasn't - there were no cute precocious little kids, no real teenage angst, no awkward wavering between gentleness and violence, and no treacly sentimentality, among other Hughes trademarks. While that was a refreshing break, at the same time this movie was missing the good trademarks found in Hughes other movies. For example, in other Hughes movies, there is usually a pretty consistent tone, as well as a feel of real polish. But in National Lampoon's Class Reunion, there is instead a real slapdash feeling. Certainly, a lot of this comes from the often cardboard-like production values, but it is also prominent with the writing of the movie. The narrative of the movie is extremely rushed at times, coming across like it was being written by someone who would only be allowed to go to the bathroom once a particular scene had been (sort of) finished. It doesn't come as much of a surprise then that the narrative also has the problem that it doesn't feel like a properly evolving story. Instead, the movie comes across as a series of barely connected vignettes, and with the movie asking the audience to care for each and every incidental occurence in the story on their unique levels manages to be simply too much to handle. You'll be exhausted at the end of the movie.

I guess that last aforementioned problem with the screenplay comes from the fact that the movie tries to do too much. The movie tries to be both horror and comedy. What makes it even worse is that neither the horror nor the comedy is particularly well done. I'll get to the comedy portion later, and look at the horror portion now. There is less horror in this movie than you might think, and thank goodness for that, because director Michael Miller (Silent Rage) seems clueless how to handle it. The opening sequence set in the past (possibly getting a little inspiration from the opening scene of the horror film Terror Train) is executed so quickly that you'll be more bewildered than anything else. When the movie switches to modern times, Miller shows an inability to stage both murders (which usually end up happening off-screen) and stalking sequences. But to be fair to Miller, he was working with characters that are the most part so lame and familiar, we simply don't care about them being stalked. The only cast member that manages to make somewhat of a spark with his material is Fred McCarren (The Boogens) as the class nobody. He comes across as likable and interesting. The rest of the cast, which not only includes Gerrit Graham (Frozen Assets) and Michael Lerner (Movers And Shakers), but also Stephen Furst (Animal House), does put out an incredible amount of energy into their performances. But all their hard work is wasted, because the characters they are saddled with are so unimaginatively written. There are cliched characters like the class snob (Graham), the snobbish beauty (Miriam Flynn, Lonely Hearts), two stoners (Barry Diamond and Art Evans) and the horny slob (Furst), character types of who you've seen in many other movies before. Other characters are more fresh and could have had promise, like the vampire exchange student (Jim Staahl, Cracking Up) and the blind/deaf girl (Mews Small, Fade To Black), but no apparent effort was made to flesh them out. Hey, let the vampire show fangs, ha ha! Let the blind and deaf girl constantly bump into things and mishear people, ho ho!

By my description of those characters in National Lampoon's Class Reunion, you are probably starting to get a good idea of the level of humor here. If not, I will tell you that the movie is extremely unfunny. The only times that I chuckled while watching the movie were a few decent gags concerning McCarren's class nobody character inability to make any of his former classmates remember him. The rest of the humor is extremely lame and unimaginative, ranging from the two stoners constantly forgetting their identities and their situation to the blind and deaf girl revealing she was an expert marksman. Desperate one-liners punched in along the way are equally inert, unless you find hilarious lines of dialogue like, "I can't die - I have six more pounds to lose!" But it's not just that the gags are terribly unfunny, they are also often set up in an extremely inept way. When a cigarette is found in the cafeteria food being slopped out, nobody seems surprised or shows any believable reaction. It's just accepted - what fun is there with that? Later, when the cafeteria cook (Anne Ramsey, Throw Momma From The Train) confronts the killer, the two start to get into a quasi-kung fu fight in the kitchen... and then suddenly, the movie cuts to the next scene. There is also a scene where when everybody knows there is a killer on the loose, four characters attempting to escape are revealed to be in a broken-down car in the interior of the building - why they heck did they waste their time doing that instead of trying to find a proper exit? It may be hard to believe, but National Lampoon's Class Reunion actually makes John Hughes efforts like Baby's Day Out and Home Alone 3 seem lively and hilarious.

(Posted September 11, 2022)