School’s Out Forever Review

Based on a novel by Scott K. Andrews, School’s Out Forever was the first film to be produced by the video game company Rebellion. It’s a film the studio hope to gain a cult following.

Lee Keegan (Oscar Kennedy) gets expelled from an elite boarding school after one prank too many. This happens just as a deadly pandemic spreads around the world. When his dad dies Lee’s mum tells her son to go back to the school and wait for her to come back from Iraq. He arrives just as the survivors at the school are about to enter into a conflict with the nearby townspeople.

Rebellion Developments is a company that has its fingers in a lot of pies. They’re best known for making the Sniper Elite games and 2010’s Alien vs. Predator. They are also the owners of 2000 AD, the comic magazine that features Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper. Rebellion has big ambitions because they are planning on making a Rogue Trooper film with Duncan Jones directing and a TV series based on Judge Dredd. School’s Out Forever seems to be a film made by Rebellion so they can cut their teeth with film production before moving onto bigger scale projects.

School’s Out Forever was based on a book published by Abaddon Books, another company owned by Rebellion. The book was a part of The Afterblight Chronicles, an anthology series set in a post-apocalyptic world. So, you can see the levels of vertical integration going on here.

School’s Out Forever was a film that used a minimum number of locations, most of the cast were unknowns and for many of the department heads, e.g. camera and make-up, it was the first time working as department heads on a feature film. Fair play to the crew, they did step up for the feature and the film did have some cool sequences showing the post-apocalyptic world and action set pieces.

The film has been marketed like it was a light genre flick. The post for the film featured boys in school uniform with items like cricket bats and javelins and the school nurse had a blood-covered top. It made School’s Out Forever look liked it was going to be a Shaun of the Dead-esque film where schoolkids must fight zombies. The tagline was “Survival just made the syllabus” and on IMDB it has been called a comedy. In reality, School’s Out Forever was a dark film with little humour.

The story and the setting were more like The Walking Dead, minus the zombies. The characters had to designate tasks and roles for their community, had to go out into abandoned towns to retrieve supplies and the big threat were groups of people who have formed into warbands. Half the film was a siege story with the schoolkids having to prepare their defences before the onslaught. There was a genuinely shocking moment involving a character the school held captive, there was a moral debate on what to do with the captive, and one of the characters does go down a violent path. It was unexpected that the film would go in this direction and it was more interesting than simply being an action-horror fest.

The two most interesting characters in the film were Mac (Liam Lau Fernandez) and Georgina Baker (Samantha Bond). Mac was Lee’s best friend and takes up a leadership role, but his dark side slowly comes out as the film progresses. He was the character that had the most of an arc. Georgina was the leader of the militia who the school has to face. She was posh, well-spoken, pleasant, and approachable. It was disarming when she was first introduced and made her a different kind of villain. Before the apocalypse she would have been an upper-middle-class woman living a comfortable life. Freya Parks who played Georgina’s daughter did look like Sansa Stark if she became a survivalist.

School’s Out Forever big issue was tonal. As stated earlier the marketing was misleading. The film did have a case of wanting its cake and eating it approach. It wanted a dark story about survival and kids being forced into an armed conflict. But it wanted the audience to sometimes relish in the violence like young characters using makeshift flamethrowers and Molotov cocktails, but should be shocked when the young characters get hurt or killed.

School’s Out Forever was a film that can appeal to fans of BBC Three/E4 dramas due to its mixes of genre setting and dark storytelling. Whilst the film does have its issues School’s Out Forever was a fun treat and a solid effort from a young group of filmmakers.