My review was written in May 1990 after watching the film at a Manhattan screening room.
A followup to the 1981 pic "Class of 1984", this violent exploitation film is too pretentious for its own good. Socko special effects in the final reel will attract genre fans patient enough to sit through the campy buildup.
As he did in the original, director Mark L. Lester takes a cynical fake-hip view of young people's future, as defined in terms accessible to what used to be the drive-in audience.
C. Courtney Joyner's inconsistent screenplay posits high-schoolers out of control a decade hence. So-called free-fire zones have been set up in urban areas around the schools in no man's land for outsiders, and are literally under the control of youth gangs. Yet Joyner still depicts the kids going to school each day, depositing their guns (including automatic weapons) at the door.
Hamming it up as an albino megalomaniac, Stacy Keach is carrying out an experiment sending three androids reconverted from army surplus to serve as teachers at Kennedy High school in Seattle and whip the students into shape. Simultaneously, hero Bradley Gregg has been let out of jail and returned to class at Kennedy in an experimental furlough program.
The gimmick of the androids beating up kids is funny at first, with most of the laughs generated by the tongue-in-cheek video graphics (done by R/Greenberg & Associates) listing punishment options from the robot point-of-view.
However, lack of script development makes the film tiresome and repetitive. Gregg has endless fights en route to a saver climax in which the warring teen gangs unite against a common enemy, the androids.
John P. Ryan and Pam Grier are loads of fun as the androids, latter mocking her image when not only her breasts but inner workings are revealed for the final reel through hokey makeup effects. Third android, Patrick Kilpatrick, doesn't get into the spirit of the black humor.
Malcolm McDowell is wasted playing the school principal and dad of pretty heroine Traci Lind. Formerly monikered Lin (her credit is incorrect on this 1988 production), she subsequently had a much better role in the quite different sci-fier "The Handmaid's Tale".
Gregg is merely okay; he looks like a teen Kenneth Branagh but acts like rocker Lou Reed. Scene-stealer is Joshua Miller, androgynous young actor who scored in "River's Edge".
Lester tries to inject a message into the "Robocop" actin, but film disintegrates into an effects show. In mocking society's slide toward police state tactics, he ends up merely servicing the audience's need for vicarious ultraviolence. McDowell's presence reminds one of Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange", a controversial but serious-minded meditation on the subject that opened the floodgates.
Tech credits are good but the overbearing musical score is just noise.