Director: Howard Avedis
Writer: Howard Avedis
From: Cult Cinema
A high school kid starts dating his teacher, but is menaced by the man stalking her.
Read that capsule description again if you have any doubt about this being a whole heaping helping of “WTF?”
The movie starts promisingly. A man is examining something in a red coffin that he keeps in an abandoned warehouse. The music and visual tone is suitably forboding. He gets into his hearse and starts driving around town, eventually parking just out of sight of the local high school. Up to this point, I thought this would be a pretty solid thriller, something along the lines of Funeral Home in that I wouldn’t turn it off if it popped up on a Saturday afternoon.
Then the title card and theme popped up and I was done.
The theme song is all wispy cheerful with lyrics about how everyone needs “a teacher” “to show them the way” in love. All this while the titular teacher is eye-fucking one of her students. That’s right, just like Coach, this is another paean to pedophilia. So let’s not spend too much time on it.
The man, Ralph, follows the teacher home and then to the dock where she goes out on her boat to sunbathe topless (nudity just shy of ten minutes in. Thanks for showing us your priorities movie). Ralph is watching from the warehouse through binoculars. Ralph’s brother, Lou, and the student from earlier, Sean, show up because Lou knows about the peeping place. Ralph hides while they take his binoculars and lech at their teacher. Ralph pops out, Lou gets scared and falls to his death. Ralph blames Sean and threatens him into silence.
Does the death matter? No, not at all. Cause we gotta get down to fucking!
The teacher, Diane, starts hooking up with Sean. His parents know, but let it go on, and Ralph keeps stalking Diane, getting ever angrier. Finally Ralph tries to attack Sean, Sean tells the truth about Lou’s death, and his parents leave him home alone to talk to a lawyer. Someone who’s mentally unbalanced and knows where you live is trying to kill you, so why don’t you hang out home alone? Of course Diane comes over and they go back to her place.
Her not-yet-ex husband calls and this is treated as a bigger problem or threat than the stalker. Sean leaves, gets kidnapped by Ralph, and Diane figures out they went to the warehouse. Ralph murders Sean, Ralph sexually assaults Diane, and she kills him. She cradles Sean’s body and weeps. THE END.
I will say up front that I don’t know why I’m not as angry about this movie as I am about Cavegirl or Going Steady. Part of it may be that, while this film has a really grotesque sexual ideology, it doesn’t center on and glorify sexual assault the way those other two do. Still, the movie’s gross and boring.
There are so many ways you could make this plot work: students trying to protect their teacher from a stalker, frankly, sounds like a pretty good one. There doesn’t have to be a sexual element here at all. But this movie doesn’t just have a pedophilic theme, it takes the opportunity to double-down on it twice! First, Sean’s mother asks him to invite the teacher over for lunch. Another teacher joins them and starts flirting with Sean in front of his mother and her friends. And it’s not playful, it’s in earnest. The second time is Later in the movie when the mother and father have a conversation revealing that they know about the relationship, and the mother approves. The only reason the father disapproves is that he seems jealous.
The movie also lacks drama. There should be some tension with the stalker in the background—someone Sean knows is stalking Diane (but that he doesn’t warn her about). There isn’t, though. Likewise no big concern about the relationship being found out and what consequences might arise from that. There isn’t even any significant importance from Lou dying except angering Ralph. It’s all pointless. Skip it.
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