Cover Art

Credits

Director: Uwe Boll Starring: Jurgen Prochnow, Kett Turton, Michael Belyea, Clint Howard, Michael Pare, Elisabeth Rosen Screenplay: Robert Dean Klein Music: Reinhard Besser Tagline: Violent Lesson... Deadly Learning Country: Canada / Germany AKA: Heart of America

It's the start of the last day of school at Riverside High, run by the fatherly Principal Lewis (Jurgen Prochnow) and teachers and students are rolling in to campus. Both the teachers and the student body have their share of hard workers and slackers. On this big day, the students are preparing to say goodbye to one phase of their lives and welcome the responsibilities of the adult world. Two of the students, Daniel (Kett Turton) and Barry (Michael Belya) have their own goodbye planned for the school. Having been brutalized for years by a gang of bullies led by stoner Ricky (Brendan Fletcher), the pair are plotting a murderous payback, to be delivered during their final Home Room class…

Yes, it's an Uwe Boll message film. Bolling For Columbine anyone?

Sorry. Couldn't resist…

Home Room is not a great film by any means, but it isn't an especially bad one either. After a wobbly start utilizing statistics on American school violence (complete with an inappropriate voiceover that tells us what we are already reading, ala Boll's Alone in the Dark) the film settles into a watchable, if superficial, look at high school brutality. The cast, for the most part, is quite good, even if the casting is occasionally questionable (Michael Pare as an English teacher?) and the students are mostly made up of the usual 22-year-old movie teenagers. The characters are simply drawn, though the actors (especially Brendan Fletcher as head bully Ricky and Clint Howard as Daniel's abusive father) do go a long way to giving them more depth than the script allows. Where the film falls apart is at the climactic massacre. It's too short and too rushed, as if the filmmakers were straining to wrap things up quickly. There's not enough time given to reflection by the characters or much of a believable aftermath. Instead, we get more clumsy statistics about real-life shootings (yes, even Columbine), delivered with that same needless voiceover.