Today’s box office birthday is a mind bender as it reminds me all about time. Remember when 1999 seemed like such a futuristic date? Well, we’re sixteen years past that now. And even more wild is we are now twenty-five years past the release of Mark Lester’s CLASS OF 1999 (1990), the kick ass sci-fi flick that promised man would be battling machine in that year.
A in-spirit-sequel to Lester’s own CLASS OF 1984 (1982), the follow-up took the idea of out of control teens to its futuristic extreme, resulting in a film the Lester described as “WESTWORLD (1973) meets BLACKBOARD JUNGLE (1955).” The man hired to write it was C. Courtney Joyner, who had already built a sterling genre resume with Jeff Burr’s THE OFFSPRING (1987) and Renny Harlin’s PRISON (1987). As is often the case in Hollywood, a series of other writers including Abby Wool and splatterpunk writing team John Skipp & Craig Spector worked on it. As Joyner told Fangoria, “Mark had me do the final draft. So I was rewriting Abby’s rewrite of my rewrite of Skipp & Spector’s rewrite of my script. That’s Hollywood.” In the end Joyner retains sole screen credit. The project was officially announced at the American Film Market in February 1988 and was one of Veston’s bigger productions during this period with a budget of $5 million under their newly formed Lightning Pictures banner.
Production began in Seattle, Washington in November 1988 with a cast led by Bradley Gregg and Traci Lin as kind of the Romero and Juliet in a gang wasteland. Lester also assembled an amazing supporting cast including Stacy Keach (sporting a white wig and contact lenses) and former delinquent Droog Malcolm McDowell (now in charge of delinquents). Best of all was the trio of Patrick Kilpatrick, Pam Grier, and John P. Ryan as the futuristic robot teachers. On the technical side, Lester had the great Mark Irwin as cinematographer, Paul Baxley coordinating the hair-raising stunts, gore FX from Rick Stratton, and robot FX supervised by Eric Allard. It all combined into one explosive package that still holds up today. Well, except for some of the outfits worn by the punks. You weren’t wearing tie-dyed tights in ’99?
Unfortunately for Lester’s film, the wheels were about to fall off of Vestron. According to a Variety article on March 15, 1989, the company survived a tumultuous 1986-87 and had a great year in 1988; they drew in a net income of $20.6 million dollars (thanks mostly to the success of DIRTY DANCING [1987] and YOUNG GUNS [1988], the latter which came out via 20th Century Fox but Vestron handled foreign markets and VHS). Just over a month later, an article appeared mentioning that Vestron had hired Merrill Lynch to find investors. Uh oh. After that, a negative Vestron story seemed to be a daily occurrence. A June 1989 headline read “Vestron Expected to Close Pic Wing, Pinkslip Staff.” In August 1989 they sold their video store chain imaginatively called The Video Store to Supermarket Video and also were denied a $100 million dollar loan. Not surprisingly, they posted huge 2nd and 3rd quarter losses and by December 1989 they were selling off everything to reduce debt.
Naturally titles in production for Vestron at the time like CLASS suffered greatly. Vestron had originally scheduled the film for a theatrical release on October 6, 1989, but that fell to the wayside with the company in such financial straits. Lester’s sci-fi sequel was actually a bit lucky in that it was picked up rather quickly (other genre titles caught up in this downfall included Stan Winston’s UPWORLD [aka A GNOME NAMED GNORM] and Anthony Hickox’s SUNDOWN, both of which would sit on the shelf for years). On March 14, 1990, a Variety article announced that CLASS OF 1999 had been acquired by Taurus Entertainment Company and they planned a theatrical release for the film. That was the good news. The bad news was Taurus had seemingly no footprint in the distribution market. Previous to CLASS their biggest release was BEST OF THE BEST (1989), which they got out on 600 screens to make a total of $1.7 million. Taurus eventually released the film in 320 locations on May 11, 1990. With such limited exposure, it did not fare well its opening weekend and came in 13th place with a haul of $767,620. However, it should be noted that the film had the second highest per-screen average that weekend in the top fifteen outside of no. 1 title PRETTY WOMAN (1990). Had Vestron lived on they probably would have gotten CLASS out onto at least 1,000 screens and it would have done better. CLASS did stick around for a few weeks and continued to draw in viewers, ending with a final tally of $2,459,895 in the U.S. This made it Taurus’ biggest grosser…and their final theatrical release.
Where CLASS OF 1999 really took off was on the home video market, which is where I first got to see it. The film proved popular enough that Cinetel felt the need to make CLASS OF 1999 II: THE SUBSTITUTE (1994). Unfortunately, even if it is directed by veteran stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos, this sequel is a crushing disappointment when compared to CLASS OF 1999.
A in-spirit-sequel to Lester’s own CLASS OF 1984 (1982), the follow-up took the idea of out of control teens to its futuristic extreme, resulting in a film the Lester described as “WESTWORLD (1973) meets BLACKBOARD JUNGLE (1955).” The man hired to write it was C. Courtney Joyner, who had already built a sterling genre resume with Jeff Burr’s THE OFFSPRING (1987) and Renny Harlin’s PRISON (1987). As is often the case in Hollywood, a series of other writers including Abby Wool and splatterpunk writing team John Skipp & Craig Spector worked on it. As Joyner told Fangoria, “Mark had me do the final draft. So I was rewriting Abby’s rewrite of my rewrite of Skipp & Spector’s rewrite of my script. That’s Hollywood.” In the end Joyner retains sole screen credit. The project was officially announced at the American Film Market in February 1988 and was one of Veston’s bigger productions during this period with a budget of $5 million under their newly formed Lightning Pictures banner.
Production began in Seattle, Washington in November 1988 with a cast led by Bradley Gregg and Traci Lin as kind of the Romero and Juliet in a gang wasteland. Lester also assembled an amazing supporting cast including Stacy Keach (sporting a white wig and contact lenses) and former delinquent Droog Malcolm McDowell (now in charge of delinquents). Best of all was the trio of Patrick Kilpatrick, Pam Grier, and John P. Ryan as the futuristic robot teachers. On the technical side, Lester had the great Mark Irwin as cinematographer, Paul Baxley coordinating the hair-raising stunts, gore FX from Rick Stratton, and robot FX supervised by Eric Allard. It all combined into one explosive package that still holds up today. Well, except for some of the outfits worn by the punks. You weren’t wearing tie-dyed tights in ’99?
Unfortunately for Lester’s film, the wheels were about to fall off of Vestron. According to a Variety article on March 15, 1989, the company survived a tumultuous 1986-87 and had a great year in 1988; they drew in a net income of $20.6 million dollars (thanks mostly to the success of DIRTY DANCING [1987] and YOUNG GUNS [1988], the latter which came out via 20th Century Fox but Vestron handled foreign markets and VHS). Just over a month later, an article appeared mentioning that Vestron had hired Merrill Lynch to find investors. Uh oh. After that, a negative Vestron story seemed to be a daily occurrence. A June 1989 headline read “Vestron Expected to Close Pic Wing, Pinkslip Staff.” In August 1989 they sold their video store chain imaginatively called The Video Store to Supermarket Video and also were denied a $100 million dollar loan. Not surprisingly, they posted huge 2nd and 3rd quarter losses and by December 1989 they were selling off everything to reduce debt.
Naturally titles in production for Vestron at the time like CLASS suffered greatly. Vestron had originally scheduled the film for a theatrical release on October 6, 1989, but that fell to the wayside with the company in such financial straits. Lester’s sci-fi sequel was actually a bit lucky in that it was picked up rather quickly (other genre titles caught up in this downfall included Stan Winston’s UPWORLD [aka A GNOME NAMED GNORM] and Anthony Hickox’s SUNDOWN, both of which would sit on the shelf for years). On March 14, 1990, a Variety article announced that CLASS OF 1999 had been acquired by Taurus Entertainment Company and they planned a theatrical release for the film. That was the good news. The bad news was Taurus had seemingly no footprint in the distribution market. Previous to CLASS their biggest release was BEST OF THE BEST (1989), which they got out on 600 screens to make a total of $1.7 million. Taurus eventually released the film in 320 locations on May 11, 1990. With such limited exposure, it did not fare well its opening weekend and came in 13th place with a haul of $767,620. However, it should be noted that the film had the second highest per-screen average that weekend in the top fifteen outside of no. 1 title PRETTY WOMAN (1990). Had Vestron lived on they probably would have gotten CLASS out onto at least 1,000 screens and it would have done better. CLASS did stick around for a few weeks and continued to draw in viewers, ending with a final tally of $2,459,895 in the U.S. This made it Taurus’ biggest grosser…and their final theatrical release.
Where CLASS OF 1999 really took off was on the home video market, which is where I first got to see it. The film proved popular enough that Cinetel felt the need to make CLASS OF 1999 II: THE SUBSTITUTE (1994). Unfortunately, even if it is directed by veteran stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos, this sequel is a crushing disappointment when compared to CLASS OF 1999.