Viking Night
Rock 'n' Roll High School
By Bruce Hall
May 15, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And you know where it starts? It starts in school, with the lax educational system we have thanks to all the hippies and communists. If you want proof, look no further than Vince Lombardi high school. Here, the principal has just retired, having been fitted with a wacky jacket and sent into the sunset to spend his declining years in a rent free rubber room. Luckily there's a new sheriff in town, and she's getting results.
Her first day on the job, Principal Togar (Mary Woronov) breaks up a parking lot dance party, fills detention hall with refugees and puts a serious dent in the black market for counterfeit hall passes. She's not just a grim faced educator dead set on putting Lombardi High back on the map. She's also an indomitable shrew, dedicated to the proposition that life should be completely devoid of anything remotely fun or interesting. Through the magic of animal testing - because she's just like that - Togar determines that the root of all evil is ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC.
That means hard times for the student body. Head cheerleader Riff Randell (PJ Soles) is obsessed with The Ramones and has her concert tickets confiscated by Togar's Hall Monitor Goon Squad (band name alert). Meanwhile, class rapscallion Eaglebauer (think Mike Damone from Fast Times, but with a receptionist and a three piece suit) finds his black market operation floundering in the face of Togar's Law (band name alert II). He gets a break when Tom, the school quarterback, takes a liking to Riff's dorky best friend Kate (Dey Young).
For a modest fee, Eaglebauer (Clint Howard) agrees to set the two up. Riff finds a way to fight back against the system . That is, when she's not daydreaming about parading around her bedroom in her underwear as Joey Ramone (Himself - all eight foot nine of him) serenades her with his spidery arms and huge turkey neck. Her plan works well, at first. Riff and Kate bend the rules and find a way to get what they want, share it with the whole class and make the principal look like an idiot in the process. Kate gets in touch with her inner beauty, Eaglebauer gets paid, and Tom gets a shiny new pimp van.
The fun is short lived though, as they come to find the Wrath of Togar (fantasy RPG name alert) to be both swift AND brutal. And so it is that the two sides find themselves at an impasse. Will Riff get the Ramones to play the song she wrote for them? Does Kate ever discover cold fusion? Will Tom get laid before he's 30? Did Joey Ramone really have two Adam's apples? Most of these questions are answered by the end of the movie, and the other one will probably just keep you awake for a few nights.
The other thing you have to remember is that Rock 'n' Roll High School isn't what you'd call a traditional "story" in any sense of the word. It's structured less like it came from a screenplay and more like it might be a Saturday Night Live skit stretched out a bit and filled in with musical numbers and a couple of fake news bits. Which is I guess what this is, except that for the first hour or so, when it still feels like it's going to be a wickedly clever riff on high school movies in general. PJ Soles is sweet and sassy, Eaglebauer is funny, and Tom starts to grow on you only the way a man who owns a pimp van can.
And then it unravels like a cheap sweater, spinning off in a dozen directions at once and ending like the world’s most warped public service announcement. So no, this is not a “story.” It's a love letter to the idea of mindless rebellion and a total contempt for authority. It aims to be punk in the way the Ramones were when they started, but succeeds in the way the Ramones did after they succumbed to self parody. But does it really matter? This is about a girl who starts an insurrection at her high school because she wants to have sex with Joey Ramone. You know, lead singer of the World’s Ugliest Band. This is beyond fantasy.
It's an anthropology experiment. It's good dumb, juvenile fun - for an hour - and then it becomes a test of your tolerance for both lazy writing AND The Ramones. Both are best experienced in small doses and depending on who you are, 90 minutes may or may not be overdose. The Ramones were a fun band, and Rock 'n' Roll high school is - for just over half of its run time, a fun movie. But they're both an acquired taste. Serious inquiries only, folks.
If you've seen it before, it might not be as good as you remember and if you haven't, it's probably better than you thought. I guess it's not the Rock that's wrong with the story, it's the way the story just runs out of gas and rolls to a stop. There IS a lot going on in the movie’s last scene but it’s activity for its own sake. It’s meant to disguise the sound of the movie spinning its wheels for as long as it does over the last half hour. But in a funny case of life imitating art, it’s the same thing that sort of happened to Punk. Anger without direction, rebellion without a reason eventually just sort of goes....poof!