Lethal Justice (1995)

This film is so weird. Every one of its ugly pieces seems to ooze out of horror films from anywhere between 1960 and 1980, anywhere besides 1995, when it was actually made. The film quality is terrible, first of all. The acting (with one exception) is barely human behavior. All the production values are so bad. AND THAT MUSIC.

It's about a teacher that gets raped by a student while her entire class lets him do it. That's a fine starting point for a dissection of modern youth along the lines of, What let this happen?, but then this movie really sucks. The rapist parades around to class for the rest of the day, no sweat. He even brags about it to his classmates, one of whom pats him on the back like they just won the big game.

That kind of bravado pretty hard to swallow, honestly. There's a rapist in the classroom, and ANYBODY is still learning math? Good heavens. Also, the rapist comes from a rich mom, so the police aren't going do anything about it, since we are meant to understand that the cops are in his mother's pocket. Nobody mentions the Mob, so she must actually be that filthy rich. This is dealt with in just one scene, where mom confronts the teacher who was just raped and assures her that her raping son is never going to be punished. Sheesh. The rape and its immediate aftermath are handled with such brutal honesty it seems like this might actually be some forgotten cinematic treasure, but then the mom announces with a grin, re: shutting up the rape victim: "I'm going to use ALL my guns." Does this woman even exist outside of Hell? It plays even weirder than it sounds.

Anyway, the victim's fellow teachers take LETHAL JUSTICE into their own hands. What follows is some pretty creative vigilante justice (turning back the clocks to create an alibi for a beatdown) and the kind of too-raw, go-for-broke acting that always shows up in movies like this. Why is that, anyway? Maybe it's because real actors have learned that audiences don't want to see that shit.

But that's just LETHAL JUSTICE.