Before Kevin Williamson came along, could anyone other than film freaks and geeks name a living, working screenwriter? Williamson's name on a movie's credits (sometimes above the title) is a signal to teenagers that they're in for some post-Gen X irony; his screenplays presume that everyone born after 1980 grew up in a video store. (Often, as he's cribbing a plot, he'll refer directly to the source--the Breakfast Club episode of "Dawson's Creek", for example.) Williamson is, in some circles, even hipper than Quentin Tarantino.

T2's Robert Patrick stars in the Williamson-scripted The Faculty as a pent-up high school football coach whose body is assumed by a parasitic alien; he proceeds to contaminate virtually the entire faculty--most amusingly, Ain't-It-Cool-News webmaster Harry Knowles (!) in his screen debut as the Teacher Most In Need of a Treadmill. A group of rambunctious whippersnappers uncover this secret early on. Together, they search for places to hide from and a defense against the cult of teacher-zombies.

Said group of archetypal--make that stereotypical--teen heroes are as follows: Delilah (Jordana Brewster), the head cheerleader and school beauty; Stan (Shawn Hatosy), ex-captain of the football team and Delilah's old flame, a jock with a yearning for learning; Casey (Elijah Wood), the underappreciated school nerd; Marybeth (Laura Harris), the naive transplant; Zeke (Josh Hartnett), the rebel without a comb, an underachieving student who deals homemade drugs out of the trunk of his car; and Stokeley (Clea DuVall--be still my heart), the faux lesbian (guys leave her alone that way) goth brainer. Proto-John Hughes, to be sure. Meanwhile, Williamson has the characters consult the text of Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers for a solution to their dilemma.

The real problem is that Rodriguez (who sat at the helm of Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn) is such an efficient director (three staff members are infected within the first five minutes of the film) that The Faculty, while enjoyable, rarely gets a chance to breathe. Relationships are pared down to their essentials; oftentimes, sworn enemies the scene before are snooping together in the next moment. Marybeth gravitates to Stokeley immediately--why? Unlike with The Breakfast Club (or any of the Body Snatchers films, for that matter), there is little reason for our protagonists to establish connections at the start.

(Aside, a new entry for Roger Ebert's Movie Glossary, "Creature In Cognito": when testing a group of people to identify the one harbouring a secret alien identity, only the last person tested will turn out to be the monster. (See also: John Carpenter's The Thing.))

There is mild subtext in Williamson's screenplay (which was polished off by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel): The Faculty at times plays like an effects-laden "Just Say No!" commercial--a great message, except that drugs defeat these aliens. Perhaps Rodriguez and co. are commenting on the merits of detox? The beauty of all three Body Snatchers movies is how emblematic of their respective periods they are (1956: McCarthyism; 1978: the Me Generation; 1993: the military state); in 1999, there is more to say about the threat of widespread mind control than what's presented here. Today's teenagers and twentysomething folks (myself included) have been spoonfed so much pop culture that I doubt they'd notice if our teachers and parents lost their personalities, too.-Bill Chambers