Poor Paula (Jill Schoelen)! She has an annoying (but hunky) boyfriend named Dwight (Brad Pitt), an obnoxious best friend (Brenda James), and a strict district attorney daddy (Martin Mull). Her teachers are all perverted weirdos. Even her lascivious principal, Mr. Dante (Roddy McDowall), can’t keep his bulging, horny eyes off her backside. As if her life wasn’t complicated enough, in walks creepy Brian (Donovan Leitch Jr.), Dwight’s former best friend, who’s been in a mental institution since he killed his father as a young boy. Brian totally has the hots for Paula and seems to pop up everywhere she goes. Also, there’s murders.

Cutting Class (1989) is a bright little slice 1980s kookery that has all the light-hearted murder and high school mayhem you need to get your teen slasher fix fully satisfied. The directorial debut and directorial swan song (at the time of this writing) of Rospo Pallenberg, the screenwriter of Excalibur (1981), is joyously silly and I am here for it. The synth, guitar, and drum machine-based film score for Cutting Class was composed by Jill Fraser, and it’s totally radical. To keep your toe tappin’ during the film, a few songs from absolute legends, Wall of Voodoo, are peppered throughout.

One annoying thing about this movie is that Brad Pitt’s character must stay so damned unlikeable to keep him in the suspect zone. Or is that just his performance? Maybe that’s Brad Pitt’s appeal. Sure, he’s a bad boy, but look at those luscious lips! I can’t stay mad at you, Dwight! Speaking of suspects, what is up with Donovan Leitch Jr.? He’s such a baby-faced and intense weirdo in this. He was in The Blob (1988)! I don’t really remember that movie. Did he play the titular blob? I am guilty of mistaking Robert Glaudini, who plays the weirdo high school janitor, for William Finley of Phantom of the Paradise (1974). Glaudini was in The Alchemist (1983). Did he play a character named Al Chemist?

Try as I might, it’s tough for me to find a slasher film from the 1980s that I don’t like. Cutting Class has a slight disadvantage since it’s partly a comedy, which can be rough depending on the writing. Slashers with unintentional humor and straight-faced sincerity are pure gold to me. Thankfully, screenwriter Steve Slavkin (who would create “Salute Your Shorts” for Nickelodeon the following year) keeps the humor more surreal than goofy. This is probably meant to be a parody of the slasher genre, but it keeps the elbows to your ribs to a minimum. Plus, the running gag with Martin Mull’s bonkers journey is sensational.

Hoo boy. Cutting Class looks like so totally tubular, dude. This transfer is excellent, and I can find nothing to complain about. To pad out my review, I was going to talk about “healthy and buttery subjective film grain” and “pixel count at peak nice maximum”, but those aren’t real things. Just know that this there’s no way anyone, anywhere is gonna have a better release of this film from now until the end of time (maybe). Extras include interviews with the lovely Jill Schoelen and the way less creepy than his character Donovan Leitch Jr. There is also a side-by-side comparison of the unrated death scenes in this movie compared to their previous home video version. AND you can watch the R-rated (and censored) version of Cutting Class if you have nothing better to do. And finally, the film’s trailer is included as well.