Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2010: High School

In what’s sure to be one of the most out-of-left-field movies in a festival that resides squarely in the left field, High School brings together a bizarre, very eclectic cast and a screenplay that should be framed on your dealer’s wall.

It’s a story as old as time. Straight-laced A-student smokes his first joint with his burnout buddy and, coincidentally, must pass a school-wide drug test the following day in order to retain his scholarship to MIT. The solution? Drug the entire student body and faculty with a highly-potent marijuana extract so that everyone fails. Been there, done that, right?Sean Marquette, Adrien Brody, and Matt Bush

Sean Marquette, Adrien Brody, Matt Bush

Not with this cast, you haven’t. Adrien Brody (The Pianist, Splice) plays a sociopath drug dealer in what can only be described as a complete transformation. Michael Chiklis (The Commish, The Shield, Fantastic Four) also undergoes a total change as the creepy principal, and you can just feel the smarm dripping off him.  Combined with a hilariously quirky supporting cast that includes Colin Hanks (Mad Men), Michael Vartan (Never Been Kissed, One Hour Photo), and Yeardley Freaking Smith (the voice of Lisa Simpson), and you’ve got a recipe for some serious hijinks.

Director John Stalburg gives all the actors (particularly Brody, Chiklis, and Hanks) freedom to riff on their lines and throw themselves into their roles, and it really shows.  Brody is spastic and often terrifying, while Chiklis is equal parts Mr Belding and Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones. The two leads, Matt Bush and Sean Marquette, are to be commended for being able to hang with the rest of this stellar cast, and they don’t fade into the background at all.

What’s absolutely criminal about High School is that this movie, bizarrely, doesn’t even have distribution yet so who knows when or if it’ll ever see the light of day outside the festival circuit! I’m baffled at how a movie with two relatively high-profile stars doesn’t have any guarantees that it’ll make it to theatres or even DVD. I would love to recommend this film to you, but there are currently no avenues in which to see it!

And that, dudes, is a total buzzkill.