After last week reviewing “Billy Jack,” I’ve taken a further dip down my father’s movie nostalgia trip with the cult teen movie “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” a Roger Corman produced B-movie built around The Ramones. No, it’s not exactly “A Hard Day’s Night,” but then The Ramones weren’t exactly the Beatles either. This musical comedy is as rightfully low-brow and fun as the band.
Sometimes you watch movies and wonder where some of these cliches come from: the extremely snooty principal, the dorky music teacher who only likes Beethoven, the freshman who gets put into a locker, the fat, disgusting hall monitors and the thick-headed football star with a great head of hair. They’re all here in spades, and it’s notoriously stupid.
After a while however you begin to realize the movie isn’t exactly smart, but at least realizes how dumb it is, bringing back completely absurd gags in which rats explode from hearing rock music and human-sized rats who attend the Ramones concert anyway. There’s also the grin worthy “Rock-o-Meter” and the “scalper” selling tickets to the show.
The movie isn’t enjoyable just because The Ramones are a part of it, who by the way seem lost and disinterested actors while not on stage. It firstly is original in centering this teenage boy marketed movie around two female characters, the nerdy but secretly pretty Kate Rambeau (Dey Young) and the peppy punk Riff Randell (P.J. Soles), who leads a fun little number of the Ramones song “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” but as sung by her.
But secondly, it playfully embraces this colorful and goofy version of teen angst, obstinacy and anarchy with images of arson, animal cruelty, torture and vandalism in its finale. Corman successfully turned “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” into a cult film because it created a sense of rebellion and connected it to so much music without making it seem like a big deal.