Director: John Mackenzie   
Cast: David Hemmings, Douglas Wilmer, Tony Haygarth

I don't look back on my school days with much fondness. In the past, I have told you stuff in school I had to suffer through, like gym class and bullies. Another thing I was stuck with at school was with insufferable teachers. Actually, I didn't have any such teachers during elementary school, but once I got to junior high, it seemed that I always had at least one teacher that rubbed me the wrong way. I can remember the English teacher I had in grade eight, and I remember in one of my first classes with him, he sprung on us students an awful task - we had to write a four hundred word essay on a certain topic, and write it in a week. To this day, I remember all my fellow students in the class looking at each other with appalled looks on their faces and softly groaning out loud as our teacher told us this incredible task we had to do. As it turned out, that was not to be our last four hundred word essay to write, but that's another story. Another teacher that gave us students another problem was Mr. Barnes, the school's math teacher. Before every class started, he would go to each and every student to see if they had done the homework he had assigned during the previous class. If you hadn't, he would scream out loud at you in front of the rest of the class. That was not the only thing about Mr. Barnes that annoyed us students. After we would have a test and he marked the papers, he would hand the papers back, reading out loud one by one the student's name and his or her grade. Until I got the hang of advanced math, I had many an embarrassing time in his class. (Strangely, I happened to be friends with his son, who attended the same school.)

Aside from having one or two teachers each year that rubbed me the wrong way as well as gym class and bullies, I realize that the school environment I had was much better than it could have been. If I had been in one of those typical American inner city schools you see so often in popular media, I don't know what I would have done. Another school environment I'm glad I didn't learn in was the British school system. I'll give you an example as to why I feel fortunate not to be educated there. One day my father, telling me stories about the old country, told me about the time when, for some reason, he was late for school. Waiting at the front door of the school was a teacher with a cane. My father knew what he had to do because he was late - raise his arm ninety degrees with the palm of his hand up. The teacher then raised his cane and THWACK, he hit my father's hand with the cane. Yes, corporal punishment was used in the British school system back then, and I later found out it was still being used in British schools when I was attending school. Besides corporal punishment, over the years I heard of some other nasty punishments British schools would give students who broke the rules, like having to write something like, "I will not be late for school" a hundred times or more. But there were other things about British schools that made me feel fortunate I wasn't getting an education there. There were school uniforms - I've never felt comfortable wearing anything but casual clothes. And there was a class system, where you'd be judged by others by your background or even the way you spoke.

I can only imagine what it would be like to have the worst of both worlds - having a teacher who had a work ethic that would put so much pressure on me, and at the same time being stuck in the British school system. It very well might drive me to do what the students in the movie Unman, Wittering And Zigo are suspected of having done. The idea of students feeling they are being pushed too much and possibly reacting in a deadly fashion seemed creepy to me, which is one reason I was attracted to this movie. The second reason was that Paramount Pictures has, for some reason, pretty much buried this movie - it's never been available on VHS or DVD even in its native England. A movie that's seems to have been made intentionally obscure is irresistible to me. The movie takes place in and around the grounds of an English private school, where the all-male students being taught are in their teen years. In the first few minutes, we learn that one of the teachers at the school has been killed in an accident, falling off a cliff near the school. A new teacher, John Ebony (Hemmings, Deep Red), is hired, and he and his wife Silvia move into a cottage on the school grounds. When John starts teaching his class, it is soon made clear he's over his head - not only is his class ill-behaved, when he subsequently tries to bring discipline to his students, his students tell him something he didn't expect - that the students killed their former teacher, because basically he rubbed them the wrong way. John refuses to believe this... at least at first. As the days go by, thanks to his "helpful" students, he starts getting clues that suggest that his predecessor may have indeed been murdered by his students. But are the boys playing a joke? More importantly, what should he do?