The biggest gag in High School, though, is its central premise: an all-American high school where every student - cheerleaders, jock, bespectacled girl nerds - is into the Ramones. Even Bartel's straight-laced music teacher eventually sees the light and tells the boys, "You're the Beethovens of our time!" In reality, of course, the marble-mouthed NY punks were too defiantly geeky to achieve the kind of mass audience success that the movie grants 'em. That niggling fact doesn't keep Rock 'N' Roll High School from being one of the greatest rock movie musicals ever made. When Joey and the boys lead the young cast of the film down the halls of Lombardi High to the stripped-down strains of "Do You Wanna Dance?" it's like the last hurrah of the teenaged drive-in movie. Too bad so few real teenagers actually saw the flick in that venue. . .

As a movie, Rock 'N' Roll High School shows the limitations of its budget and its enthusiastic-but-inexperienced makers. (A few of its jokes come off flatter than they should, simply because they're shot too quickly and haphazardly.) Some elements would reappear in later, slicker movies by Arkush & Dante - deejay Don Steele, for instance, who appears as Screamin' Steve in the picture, plays a similar roll as Rockin' Ricky in Dante's Gremlins, while the larger-than-life mouse is paralleled by an anthropomorphic Crumb-styed joint in Get Crazy - as if both moviemakers really had a pressing need to get these bits right a second time. But for all its many flaws (heck, in part, because of 'em!), Rock 'N' Roll High School successfully pulls you into its punked-out parallel universe. "Things sure have changed since we got kicked out of high school," lead singer Joey Ramone observes as he strides through the halls of the soon-to-be-decimated school building.

True, Joey. But teen-aged lust, "mindless" adult authoritarianism and the glory of great rock 'n' roll remain ever constant. . .