Entertainment

MOVIES BEAT COLORADO KILLERS TO THE PUNCH; CRUEL TO YOUR SCHOOL

There’s no more complete way to obliterate a miserable teen-agehood than to level the building that represents it.

DESTROYING their high school is not an idea original to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine HS gunmen who planted powerful homemade bombs inside the school building (not to mention their accomplices).

Blowing up or setting a high school on fire has been a key theme in at least three teen films enduringly popular on video and shown constantly on television.

“Carrie,” “Heathers” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” all feature alienated teen-agers whose anger leads to the destruction – or narrowly averted destruction – of their high-school buildings. In each case, the violence represents an apocalyptic final solution to vexing teen angst. There’s no more complete way to obliterate a miserable teen-agehood than to level the building that represents it.

The films are distinctly different in tone. “Carrie” is a gory supernatural thriller in which an abused social misfit wreaks savage revenge on hateful classmates. “Heathers” is a cynical black comedy featuring a put-upon young woman who murders her tormentors by proxy. “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” is an exploitation yukfest in which a united teen front rebels against authority figures.

In Brian De Palma’s “Carrie” (1976), Sissy Spacek plays the title role, a repressed teen-ager raised by a religious fanatic mother. Carrie is viciously mistreated by the popular kids at Bates High. When she has her first menstrual period in a shower, and mistakenly thinks she’s bleeding to death, the other girls use her as a scapegoat for their own menstrual anxieties, pelting her with insults and tampons.

Later, when she attends the prom, Carrie is doused with a bucket of blood. Bad move. Psychically gifted Carrie unleashes a telekinetic torching of the school, dispatching her torturers and leaving poor old Bates High a raging inferno.

Carrie’s sufferings were practically medieval, but in Michael Lehmann’s “Heathers” (1989), Veronica (Winona Ryder) is actually a popular girl who grows alienated from the trio of prisspots, all named Heather, with whom she forms the hot-chick clique.

Veronica starts dating cool, disaffected loner J.D. (Christian Slater). When he starts knocking off Veronica’s nemeses – the Heathers and the jocks – she’s bothered, but not that much. It’s only when J.D. wires the entire school with bombs that Veronica tries to stop the violence and saves the school from blowing up.

Allan Arkush’s cartoonish comedy “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” (1979) does have an explosive ending, but it’s about as serious as dynamite going off under Wile E. Coyote’s tuchus. In the Roger Corman-produced cult flick, raucous teens harass the jerky principal and Puritanical teachers, eventually making their alma mater go kablooey after school authorities burn rock ‘n’ roll records.

Were these films on the Trench Coat Mafia’s top 10 rentals list? We shall see. The only film that has been mentioned as possibly linked to the shootings at Columbine and other schools is “The Basketball Diaries,” a 1995 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. MGM, the film’s distributor, has announced it is recalling all video copies in response to the Colorado shootings.

Though the film features a dream sequence in which real-life troubled teen Jimmy Carroll (DiCaprio) pulls a shotgun out of his leather trench coat and blows away his teacher and classmates, Jimmy never acts violently toward anyone at his school. He retreats into heroin. The only thing his anger destroys is his own life.