If you're in high school -- or in your dotage and still having nightmares about the experience -- the proposition that teachers are from another planet will not seem like a ludicrous Hollywood fantasy. It would be more an affirmation of your long-held suspicions.

Of course, it should be immediately added that if you're a teacher, the idea that the student body is composed entirely of hostile aliens amounts to the only logical explanation for their attire, attention span and attitude.

But in the shrewdly calculated audience demographics behind "The Faculty," teachers don't count.

Fitfully amusing and full of busy camerawork, Robert Rodriguez's horror comedy takes us to the hallowed halls of Herrington High in Ohio.

There is an acute shortage of books, supplies and money for extra-curricular activities, but this is one high school that boasts a fully stocked movie reference library. Hardly a minute of the film goes by without some pun, homage or just plain rip-off of "Alien," "The Thing," "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and a host of other sci-fi classics.

Since the screenplay is by Kevin Williamson, who did much the same thing in the two highly popular "Scream" films, that's not surprising.

"The Faculty" is one of those movies that sounds better as a one-line concept than a full-fledged film. But it will doubtless pack in teen-agers who will relish what is essentially "Instruction of the Body Snatchers."

The fun begins -- where else? -- on the football field where the coach goes from being the out-to-lunch psycho his players know and hate to something truly malevolent.

VTC Soon, through various gross-out procedures, he has recruited the principal, the terminally inhibited English teacher, the lush who offers the most boring history lessons in the universe and so on.

Ranged against this alien takeover headquartered in the faculty lounge are the usual high school movie suspects. Elijah Wood, who made a wonderful contribution to "The Ice Storm," is the newly arrived outcast who is the first to smell more than a dissected rat in the biology lab. His allies include the school's super-bright pusher of controlled substances, whose wares have alarming effects on the aliens, and the quarterback who's tired of athletic stardom and wants to concentrate on academics (remember, this is a comic fantasy).

The casting of the teachers has some genuine inspirations with drama teacher Piper Laurie conjuring memories of "Carrie," and Robert Patrick, Arnold's opposition in "Terminator 2," playing the coach.

As usually happens in this kind of deceptively difficult exercise, the elusive balance needed to sustain the tone of the picture -- the one struck perfectly by "Men in Black" -- eludes Williamson and Rodriguez. The horror undermines the humor and vice versa. But kids sentenced to go back to high school after the holidays will gleefully cherish the macabre rationale of "The Faculty" for what awaits them.

'The Faculty'

Starring Elijah Wood, Piper Laurie, Robert Patrick

Directed by Robert Rodriguez

Released by Dimension Films

Rated R (violence, language)

Sun score ** 1/2

Pub Date: 12/25/98