Viking Night: Class of Nuke 'Em High
By Bruce Hall
January 14, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
That’s would be okay, except that it never really works put the way it’s meant to. Social satire is fine, but when it’s poorly informed and executed it comes across as lazy and dumb, which tends to undermine your message. The movie does a little better (but not much) when it takes a stab at one obvious high school trauma/teenage hangup or another. But in a film whose production values are on par with that third grade Christmas play where you wet your pants on stage, you can’t really expect the screenplay to be a strong point - and it’s not. I try to walk a fine line when writing about cheap, sleazy movies made for teenage boys, because when you set your bar that low it doesn’t take much to clear it. It shouldn’t be that hard to make a nuclear teenage marijuana sex romp, but I’m man enough to admit when I was wrong.
So, we all know that nuclear power plants are dangerous, right? If you live, work, or go to high school anywhere near one, you will eventually obviously get cancer and die. Or if you’re lucky, you’ll only mutate into a crazed, sub-humanoid freak with an insatiable hunger for delicious human flesh. This much is obvious. What you probably didn’t know is that the people who run nuclear power plants give exactly half of one rat’s ass about you, your family or your precious genitals. This is why there are no rules or regulations of any kind at nuclear power plants. This allows them to dump their glowing green death-slime into the water supply, where it makes its way to our schools and into the bodies of our precious children, leading to that whole “flesh eating sub-humanoid freak” thing.
Okay, fine. I can accept this.
But the real weirdness begins after the class nerd drinks green water from a contaminated fountain. This results in some Indiana Jones style face-melting, right in the middle of World History. Suspicion immediately falls upon the nearby power plant, with its parking lot dotted by glowing green pools of industrial spooge. But the plant administrator (Pat Ryan) is too busy yelling and sweating to mount a serious investigation. So just like in all the best Scooby-Doo episodes, it occurs to the two most attractive cast members that a super-groovy mystery is brewing right under everyone’s noses. Chrissy (Janelle Brady), the Head Cheerleader, and Warren (Gil Brenton), the Class Hunk, surmise that radiation poisoning might be why the Honor Society suddenly mutated from law abiding pencil pushers into a beer swilling, gun toting, pot farming gang of maniacs called the Cretins.
It’s a pretty good theory, but their investigation is limited to attending a wild beach party where they accidentally smoke some radioactive pot, courtesy of the Cretins. What follows are a number of significant plot developments, some sexy and some not very sexy at all. None of them really work; the story is mostly a series of half-hearted/borderline incompetent gags centered around the following mildly amusing concept: What if a nuclear power plant contaminated a bunch of marijuana, and some kids smoked it? Okay, that’s actually a little funny, and I could really see that going a lot of places. But the thing is, Nuke ‘Em High falls all over itself to deliver pot jokes, barely legal boobs and atomic mutants, and it does this very well.
Never in movie history has the creative balance between weed, tits and mutants been in such perfect harmony. I can’t deny that this is truly an achievement. But the story doesn’t really have any idea what to do or where to go with all this, so the plot just meanders through all the wide open spaces between stupid and boring before it completely loses track of itself about halfway through. I would call what it does “derivative”, but even that implies a level of creativity that I just don’t see on screen. It would call what it does “funny” if the jokes were coherent, or delivered in any kind of context. And needless to say, it’s far too stupid to be scary. I can also tell you that if they wanted to warn me off nuclear power, all they did was make me determined to see it used against everyone involved with this sad, boring, pointless movie.
I don’t mind bad movies when there are good things about them that I can enjoy. Faster Pussycat is oddly funny and stylish. Big Trouble in Little China embraces itself like a kid jumping a trampoline for the first time. Meanwhile, Nuke ‘em High is more like a six-year-old who thinks the only way to make people laugh is to blow your whole load of fart jokes in one long, rambling sentence. Call me harsh if you want but to me, farce devoid of imagination is a little less fun than judging a nose picking contest. With just a teeny, tiny bit of effort this could have been a lot better than it was - although I mean that in the way I do when I say I’d rather drink warm beer than warm milk. A movie can be cheap, stupid or dull - but it can’t be all three. Sadly, Class of Nuke ‘Em High blows the curve and nails the trifecta.