Sweet Pain: ROCK N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL

What Lindsay said… I like high school movies and I like music movies and this was both

Despite being well-acquainted with his name, I haven’t had much actual viewing experience where Roger Corman is concerned. Who’d have guessed that my wife would be the one to bring me into the light?

In 1979, Corman produced ROCK N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL; a vehicle for punk icons, The Ramones. In true Corman form, it’s a silly B movie revolving around the bad influence of rock music on teenagers…and mice.

If you must know, the story revolves around Vince Lombardi High School, where a new principal is looking to institute a new reign of authority over the student body. Unfortunately for her and her Hall Monitor minions, a girl named Riff is undermining her rule with help from the music of her favorite band – The Ramones.

Like most vehicles, the film is entirely fluffy. Given the film’s place in this writing series – smack between the ugliness of WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE and the engaging quality of AMERICAN MOVIE – its fluffiness was welcomed. Funny thing about fluffy films since I’m on the subject: Lindsay’s shelf is stacked with ’em, but because she dislikes films with weight. She just knows that I’ll pick up most of the weighty films, so she spends her cash on the lighter stuff I won’t. The inverse is true of the absence of musicals on my shelf. But back to the fluffiness of HIGH SCHOOL, I ate it up. I might live and die by titles like SE7EN and HEAT, but neither of those titles featured a scene with Marky Ramone playing bass in a shower (fully dressed!) .

I have to smile as I think about ROCK N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL because it harkened back to a different age – an age when the adults in authority either didn’t get it, or didn’t like it. It was so radically different from the music the adults in authority knew, and so seemingly dangerous. Not only does modern rock not come with that sort of danger anymore, but with the authority figures mostly the age that Riff and her friends would be now, they aren’t nearly as afraid.

Question to my younger readers: Is there *any* modern music truly considered taboo?

It wasn’t hard to figure out why the Corman-inspired silliness and the overall poppiness of this movie appealed to my beloved, after all we’re talking about a woman whose favorite film is GREASE, a slightly distant cousin of ROCK N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL. The party-song scenes that involve all the girls in the gym doing a fully staged routine to the title track are Lindsay’s bread and butter…and gosh are scenes like that fun to watch. They remind me of what a show like Glee could be if it wasn’t so concerned with takin itself seriously.

While I wouldn’t dare mention ROCK N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL in the same breath as great rock films like THIS IS SPINAL TAP or A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (which was also a vehicle), it’s a film that I had nothing but fun with and am really happy that I finally pulled down from the shelf.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go listen to “Road to Ruin”