VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the Patreon for the Video Archives podcast. You can hear a preview here.

My parents were both teachers and I think they would have been offended, as hippie pacificists, by this but they would come around to love it.

Director Robert Mandel also made F/X and School Ties, as well as episodes of Lost and Prison Break. The script comes from Roy Frumkes, who made Document of the Dead and wrote Street Trash. He was joined by Rocco Simonelli and Alan Ormsby, whose career is filled with magic, such as Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Deathdream, Deranged, the movies within a movie in Popcorn and so much more.

Jonathan Shale (Tom Berenger) is a black ops killing machine, forced to return home after a mission gone bad. He meets up with his girlfriend, Jane Hetzco (Diane Venora), who works as a teacher at Miami’s Columbus High School and all seems good for a little rest and relaxation. Except that one of the Kings of Destruction gang has followed her while jogging and broke her leg.

You or I would call the police.

Shale goes to war.

By the end of the first day, he’s beaten several students down and earned the ire of Principal Claude Rolle (Ernie Hudson) but begins to bond with teachers and students, as they have been in a war zone, just like him. Everyone is seeming to get along except the KOD and their leader, Juan Lacas (Marc Anthony, pre-singing days). It turns out that Rolle is dealing cocaine through the gang, which means that Shale beings his mercenary team to battle it out in the high school against the gang, a rival merc squad led by Janus (Willis Sparks) and gangster Johnny Glades (Rodney A. Grant).

Roger Ebert hated this movie. Hated it. “”I am so very tired of this movie. I see it at least once a month. The title changes, the actors change, and the superficial details of the story change, but it is always about exactly the same thing: heavily armed men shooting at one another. Even the order of their deaths is preordained: First the extras die, then the bit players, then the featured actors, until finally only the hero and the villain are left.”

Lovers of action movies, however, adored it, leading to three sequels: The Substitute 2: School’s Out,  The Substitute 3: Winner Takes All and The Substitute: Failure Is Not an Option. Berenger did not come back for those, as Treat Williams played Carl Thomasson (Karl in movies 3 and 4), a man who is friends with the sole survivor of Shale’s mercenary group, Joey Six (Angel David, taking over for Raymond Cruz). As for Shale and Jane, they are married and teach in foreign nations as part of the Peace Corps.

This was filmed in the summer in Miami, where kids stuck in summer school ended up being extras, getting served Papa John’s Pizza every day.

You can watch this on Tubi.