Audience Member
1987: A mega rich businessman takes a job as a high school counselor to help out four troubled kids with various issues. He helps out the troubled kids, but turns out the new counselor has serious issues of his own. Very odd movie, rather boring in much of the movie. The acting is rather indifferent. The ending is sort of jolting, but I guess it wraps itself up, as the counselor and the students are on their way to bettering themselves and understanding each other. Curious miss.
Stars: Eric Douglas, Marlon Jackson, Susan Scott, Elizabeth Singer, Ronee Blakey, and Richard Horian.
Directed by Richard Horian.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
01/12/23
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Audience Member
The usual Trojan comedy? Stars Marlon Jackson and Michael Douglass brother. Virtually no plot, but enjoyable.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/31/23
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I don't know why every review I see for this is bad. I really liked it. Sure the actors aren't the best, and it's low budget, but it didn't matter for me. The story and characters were very interesting, strange and yet real. It's a different kind of coming of age story, but also full of good real life drama between the guidance counselor and the teens. I've never seen such an interesting guidance counselor in a film. If you think of this as more of a quirky drama, I think you'll enjoy it more, it's not really a comedy. I really liked this movie.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/22/23
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Within the first five to ten minutes (tops) you'll be aware of what's going on but you'll have your hopes and desires too as to what may well be nothing more than an over-the-top farce or self-parody or even mean-spirited prank. After all it's been produced and distributed by Troma and has Richard Horian in the lead role as a suicidal high school guidance counselor who happens to be a millionaire. This movie is a freaking mess in all corners and the stench of B-grade pretentiousness is overwhelming at times. The only redeeming factor is actor Horian overacting and practicing his emphatic bug-eyed stares into space, as surely you will end up doing if you bother to check this dreck out. This is for bad movie aficionados who have nothing else to watch or Troma completists ONLY.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/17/23
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What a incredibly distasteful, terrible, horrible, wrong message showing, low life piece of cinema garbage.
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
01/18/23
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So it looks like I'm the first person to review this movie on Flixter, and the third to actually rate it. The median of the two who rated it before myself only equaled out to a half-star.... What the hell is wrong with you two? Humorless, boring tits you both are.
It's either very fortunate or unfortunate that director/writer/star Richard Horian made this movie in 1987, predating both viral marketing as well as Tommy Wisseau's "The Room" by about 15 years or so. Horian was either way ahead of his time, or he missed the boat (or was early for it...whatever).
Like "The Room" this is a film that when you see it the first time you are just not sure what to make of it -- and you can watch it ten more times and still not be completely sure. The pacing is all over the place (especially during the second half, specifically the final act when it truly feels like everyone just became disinterested in what they were doing and ended the thing mid-scene). The dialogue is stilted and rambling; characters speak very, very vividly about subjects that are vague and unclear. Marlon Jackson's character is blatantly introduced as some kind of computer genius/program inventor but the exposition of this basically just goes around in circles before flying into a brick wall, replete with lengthy scenes of Douglas Sirkian dialogue that are maybe just one or two notches shy of one character saying to him: "You, Marlon Jackson, are some computer guy of some kind that has some kind of potential to do something great that may or may not have something to do with some kind of computer program or something similar to that." And that's true for most of the characters, especially Horian's as the high school guidance counselor/self-made millionaire who lives in a house with "20 rooms" with his wife, a snotty former[?] model[?] who, when not spending tens of thousands of dollars of his money at fashion shows, reads long passages of steamy romance novels aloud by the fire place.
Besides having the eyes and sweat glands of a serial rapist chained inside of a poorly ventilated trailer meth lab the guidance counselor has more than just marital problems following him. Years of psychotherapy and listening to the problems of others, without examining his own, has obviously taken a grand toll on him, causing him to be suicidal and detached from reality. Hallucinations are commonplace for him (in an early example he dreams of his dead mother entering his bedroom to strangle him... or I think this is his mother?... It's an elderly woman...He aludes to it being a former student of his...I think?...Is he a several hundred year old vampire in addition to being a high school guidance counselor/millionaire?... Like all great art, you'll be thinking about it for hours and will probably never reach a fitting or definitive conclusion).
Masked mental health issues aside, there is something acutely strange about the focus on the importance of high school guidance counselors in this film. It's perplexing why Horian would be so sought-after by the school to be their new counselor, or why Horian, the mutlimillionaire psychoanalyst would be so eager to accept the offer. I don't know how it is in other schools but from my experience all my counselor did was screw my college transcripts up by sending them to the wrong school and went golfing three out of five days a week, but then again I didn't go to school with Michael Douglas' badboy brother, Eric -- the brilliant but misguided woodshop savant who likes to start electrical fires in the boiler room which causes completely arbitrary wacky 80's beach parties and wet t-shirt contests in the hallways when the fire alarm and sprinkler system goes off.
Actually that's precisely the reason why Horian's character took this job as we come to find out. He wants the troubled kids of this school to finally realize their true potential... Well, not all the kids, just four of them; four kids he knows absolutely nothing about (and he really does know nothing about them too, he demands that his secretary gather up all the information she can about the four without it even being established that he even knows about their existence), but decides to take a keen and unhealthy interest in. In addition to Eric Douglas (Johhny) and Marlon Jackson (Joey), he becomes feverishly interested in two women, Susan Bishop who although a straight-A student had her social life completely turned upside down and distorted when she became the recipient in a minor car crash which left a large piece of 1.99 latex from Sepncer's gifts permanently fused to the side of her face (which she now masks by gluing large chunks of hair to her face thinking no one will notice) and Elizabeth Singer, the school's permanent semen storage facility who desperately wants to make it in "the film business," which is obviously code for porn except no one in the entire movie -- not even the smut peddlers themselves, talking alone amongst each other later in the film -- refers to it anything but "the film business."
Horian's character of course, knowing everything he knows about human psychology, begins to amend things for the troubled kids. And he starts by giving Susie a full makeover and the name of a good plastic surgeon he knows.
And all this happens in just the first 30 minutes.
The next hour of the film slowly goes down an even stranger path with Horian begging ice-cream cone licking muggers to kill him and later attempts suicide, Susan getting indoctrinated into the "film business" and nearly getting gang-raped by a pair of cryogenically created Don Johnson clones , Marlon Waynes randomly administering a sensual massage to his mother, and in a very Tennessee Williams-inspired scene Horian tries to convince Eric Douglas' father (Kirk) to encourage his son to become a mechanical engineer in which the father responds my angrily smashing up his own kitchen with an aluminum baseball bat with almost non-existent rationality. And all of it leads to a disorienting and bewildering conclusion that will have you questioning the film for days, possibly leading to you writing a rambling review of it for IMDb or Netflix that no one in their right mind would bother reading.
There's no easy way to describe "Student Confidential" in a nutshell, and I'm quite certain that I have failed to do so here. It's almost as if Tommy Wiseau had directed a piece of "Saved by the Bell" fanfiction that Ranier Werner Fassbinder haphazardly authored in a mescaline-soaked, stroke-inducing cocaine haze while "Blackboard Jungle" was on TV on maximum volume from three apartments over. It's hilarious and bizarre and although it very much appears it came out this way as an act of sincerity shades of doubt keep reappearing in my conscience about the whole experience. Richard Horian has crafted either the most ironic campy high school movie ever made, or he's very much in on the joke and the audience has become the ultimate punch-line. And even a third possibility exists: Horian is a cinematic time traveler and he created this film as a scathing satire of "Dangerous Minds," "Freedom Writers," and "Half Nelson." I'm willing to accept any reality, but whatever the case may be the end result is a gleefully positive one the way I look at it. It's extremely rare that I get this much entertainment from a movie, good or bad, and it's definitely been an influence on me putting off suicide for at least a week or more. Probably spending that up-with-life time to examine Richard Horian's career more closely... Or at least until I die of a heart attack in my sleep having nightmares of Horian's unblinking, emotionless face.*
*(I barely glossed over it in this review but...the guy is just scary to look at... not ugly...just... frightening. You'll see soon enough.)
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/05/23
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