Top 10 High School Pranks

• While John Travolta and co. romanticised high school days in Grease the students portrayed in the rude and crude and very funny Porky’s (1982) told it like it was, the key subject on their minds being making it with the opposite sex. Whether this meant creeping behind the girl’s showers or listening out as Coach Brackett (Boyd Gaines) finds why his colleague Miss Honeywell (an early role for Kim Catrall) is nicknamed Lassie, the laughs flowed consistently.
• Still hugely enjoyable all these years later, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) depicted the coolest of high school students, a character so together that he did his own thing despite the pressure of lovingly attentive parents and fevered pursuit of the suspicious Dean Rooney (Jeffrey Jones). Even nervy best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) can’t stop him pulling the ultimate prank and taking the day off school to go on an adventure of a lifetime around the city.
• Another modern classic written and directed by John Hughes, The Breakfast Club (1985) is the best movie ever made about a detention. Before long the mismatched group of errant students have bonded over their common grievances with school, and begun to run rings around stern teacher Mr Vernon (Paul Gleason). We see them as we want to see them, and together Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall are great here.
• These days a successful director, Cameron Crowe began his career as a journalist and spent some time undercover in a high school which resulted in the book – and later the film – Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982). The antics of the students here had the whiff of authenticity for a reason, and as they got up to all manner of mischief (mostly involving romantic rivalries) Sean Penn’s stoner character Jeff Spicoli put the high in high school.
• The dream of being named Prom Queen is one every American girl fantasises about, so we are led to believe, but it proved a nightmare for Sissy Spacek’s eponymous character in Carrie (1976). The teens who engineered her unlikely victory – alongside the hunk she had long admired from afar – ensured she would remember it forever by tipping a bucket of pig’s blood over her at the moment of her crowning glory. The gag was on them though, as Carrie’s supernatural powers were channelled to deadly effect in this adaptation of Stephen King’s novel.
• Homicide was very much the order of the day in the cultish Heathers (1988) too, and if killing to be cool seems a little extreme as high school pranks go it made for an enthralling movie. Winona Ryder played Veronica, a girl desperate to belong to the most popular group in high school – the Heathers – and Christian Slater was her outsider boyfriend J.D., determined to even the odds with a loaded gun and a wolfish grin.
• Mean Girls (2004), as its title suggests, was not quite so extreme. Indeed it was played for laughs, though the issues of cliques and the desire to fit in were to the fore here too. Lindsay Lohan, in the days when she featured on the film review pages and not the gossip columns, is 16 year old Cady, who observes the antics of her new classmates – and the unpleasant clique ‘the Plastics’ – with the same dispassionate eye of her zoologist parents.
• Another influential comedy, American Pie (1999) achieved many things in its 95 minute running time, not the least of which was ensuring you never looked at an apple pie the same way again. The urgent need to get off with the opposite sex was the prime motivation for Jim, Oz, Finch and the rest too though most of the pranks were instigated by the obnoxious Stifler (Seann William Scott) with a pleasing number backfiring on him.
• A bit more class was shown by the Shakespeare inspired 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). The Taming of the Shrew cleverly transposed to an American high school setting it featured Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) falling for the aloof but vulnerable Kat (Julia Stiles). Cameron (Joseph Gordon Levitt) had a vested interest in seeing love blossom as he was in love with her younger sister Bianca, but pal Michael (David Krumholtz) was the prank magnet here, most memorably involving a marker pen and a phallus.
• Returning to high school as undercover cops in 21 Jump Street (2012), Jenko and Schmidt find themselves reliving a time they view with contrasting emotions. Jenko (Channing Tatum) was popular and athletic, the top dog; Schmidt (Jonah Hill) wasn’t. But times have changed since their graduation, and academic pursuits are seen as cool while old style pranks have slipped out of fashion to the alarm of one of our heroes and the delight of the other.