The Faculty is a passable teen comedy trapped in the body of dumb, disposable horror epic.  It delivers a steady stream of pop culture riffs from a cast of angsty John Hughes knockoffs.  These winky references duke it out with wearying jump scares and gratuitous gore for dominance of the movie’s overall aesthetic.  Nobody wins, resulting in a movie that never figures out what it wants to be.  The Faculty never quite succeeds, but it’s also too good to completely fail.

For all its attempts at cleverness, Kevin Williamson’s script is achingly simple:  We open in a stereotypical small town, where football is everything and bullies abound.  A group of Breakfast Club leftovers must deal with different layers of teenage alienation.  We get the dweeby hero (Elijah Wood), the miserable emo girl (Clea DuVall), the bitchy hot chick (Jordana Brewster), the surly jock (Shawn Hatosy), the aloof stoner (Josh Hartnett), and the blonde virgin (Laura Harris).  These characters are so stock, I don’t even need to supply you with names.

While the Sixteen Candles kids sort through their teenage feels, strange things are happening amongst the faculty.  Many teachers undergo stark personality changes:  The icy, severe principal (Bebe Neuwirth) is suddenly sultry and vivacious.  The jerkwad football coach (Robert Patrick) displays an alarming friendliness.  When Wood’s nerdlinger discovers a mysterious, grub-like organism slinking in the football bleachers, he takes it to Mr. Furlong (Jon Stewart), the school’s science teacher.  (Furlong has a goatee, which means he probably smokes weed and listens to Cure albums.)  Upon analysis, they deduce this critter is a parasitic being that multiplies quickly.  After seeing the teachers acting all funky, our heroes eventually deduce these must be bodysnatcher aliens bent on world domination.

From that rail-thin plot, you get 104 minutes of frantic goofiness.  With its breakneck pace, logic might be the movie’s most egregious casualty.  Entire chunks of the film are never properly explained:  Why, for example, is Hartnett’s flunky drug dealer a scientific genius?  Or, why would water-based aliens choose Earth–especially a landlocked town–for a land invasion?  In the wise words of Forrest Gump, that just don’t make no sense.

But hey, horror flicks usually can’t withstand scrutiny, so why should this one be the exception?  The fact is, this lack of reason doesn’t sink the movie, because its biggest strength lies elsewhere:  While Rodriguez and Williamson strive to blend John Hughes and John Carpenter, they actually owe another debt to the brazen teen satire of John Waters.  Underneath its horror surface, The Faculty works as a clever play on the cliquish nature of high school and the heavy pressure to fit in.  Every lead character lives with some sense of loneliness, and the parasites represent a hive mind where assimilation brings unity.  That the murderous aliens can offer a tempting place to belong is one of the movie’s most clever angles.

I’m also here for most of the performances.  Amongst the grown-ups, Patrick is a standout.  His football coach is a stomping, screaming monster of toxic masculinity.  (I can testify these coaches grow in small towns like weeds.)  It’s a big, campy role, and Patrick has a ball with it.  That goes ditto for Neuwirth, who goes slinky and seductive for the possessed principal.  On the kid side, Wood is a bit on-the-nose as the hem-haw geek, but he acquits himself well.  Actually, Harris’ oddball newcomer and DuVall’s disenfranchised goth chick make the strongest presences.

If I’m quibbling, Rodriguez wastes Hayek as the school nurse and Famke Janssen as the nebbish literary teacher.  Maybe they’re both part of the filmmakers’ grand plan to flip the clichés–ordinarily, such attractive actresses would get more burn in a movie like this.  In any case, they’re both too fun to marginalize.  Hell, I even wanted a little more Jon Stewart.

Again, I’m picking too many nits.  The Faculty is easy, junky entertainment.  It’s never as memorable or clever as it thinks it is, but that ends up being part of its charm.  You can throw this on during a Halloween party and it play in the background.  Nobody will complain.  In fact, The Faculty might work best in micro-doses.

104 min.  R.  Paramount Plus.