My Tutor (1983)

Directed by George Bowers
Starring Caren Kaye, Matt Lattanzi, Crispin Glover, Clark Brandon
Rated R
USA
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"Sue-Anne, would you like to dance with me?"
"No thank you."
"Then I guess a blowjob is completely out of the question?"

My Tutor stars Olivia Newton John's ex-husband, former Xanadu dancer Matt Lattanzi as Bobby, your average 17 year-old muscle-bound, feathered-hair sporting, upper-class virgin, currently lovesick over picture-pretty Bonnie (Amber Denyse Austin, Cathy Crosby's daughter) and best friend to a phlegmy, sex-obsessed, sweater vest wearing nerd named Jack.

Ahem. Clearly, this Lattanzi character is way too Alpha-male to be playing this role, and even an ugly rich kid with his own wheels can get laid plenty in high school, so this premise is deeply flawed from the start. But we're already ankle-deep, so let's just roll with it.

As the film opens, Bobby's slamming his head into the side of his bitchin' black van, in mortal agony over Bonnie's casual dismissal of his affections. Oddball Jack ambles over to lighten his load.
"It's over," croaks Jack (an already-creepy 19 year old Crispin Glover),"Time to kick out the jams. Summertime fun!" He says this like a serial killer. Not on purpose, but still.

Later that evening, Jack's gregarious older brother Billy (Fast Food's Clark Brandon) takes them to a whorehouse to lose their virginity. Crispin ends up with an S&M freak. Bobby gets Russ Meyer's ex girlfriend, Kitten Natividad. Crispin ends up bolting out of there in his boxers, crying his eyes out. Bobby, who gulped down a flask full of whiskey to bolster his nerves, just falls asleep on Kitten's mountainous tits. In his defense, they do look very pillowy.

The next morning Bobby meets with his dad (cranky genre vet Kevin McCarthy) who informs him that he will not get into Yale unless he passes his French final, which he just failed miserably. Dad's one of those nasty old fuckers with connections though, so he worked it out so that Bobby can take the final again, and this time, he's going to have a tutor to help him get ready. The very next day, while he's lazily splashing around in his in-ground swimming pool, his tutor arrives. Terry Green (sitcom vet Caren Kaye) is a pretty, no-nonsense 30-something that's taken the job as live-in tutor for the summer to escape an old boyfriend. She seems alright but Bobby, who really is a dick, is both snotty and vaguely lewd to her.
"I can tell, you're really going to work me hard this summer," he snorts.

Back on the pussy trail, Billy takes the fellas to a diner, where he introduces them to a melon-chested waitress named Silvia (Graem McGavin, Weekend Pass, Angel), who is also a part-time prostitute. Or maybe she's just really slutty, hard to say. At any rate, he convinces her to fuck these two idiots in his car in the back alley of the restaurant. Bobby's up first, but before they get too far, Silvia's psycho biker boyfriend (is there any other kind, in these movies?) shows up and chases a naked Bobby around. Biker gangs, loony bin whorehouses, and waitress-hookers...what town is this, Sodom?

Later on, Terry takes a nude moonlight swim, while Bobby hides in the bushes and beats off. Wow, this movie sounds sleazy on paper. Later on, he fantasizes about fucking Jewel Shepard. Who knows how Jewel got roped intro this, but she pops 'em out and then splits.

The fellas go to a bar with mud wrestling. Crispin, for whatever reason, has a fake ID with a black kid's face on it. He hands it to the (black) doorman, and says, in a wack 'urban' voice: "Hey blood, what's happnin', my man? Alright alright cuz, please lemme in!" I almost expected him to add "Hidey-ho!" on his way in. Fucking crazy. Anyway, Bobby waits outside, but Jack and Billy wrestle Katt Shea (Hollywood Hot Tubs, Preppies) and then get tossed out. A buncha bullshit happens and as they leave, Billy tears off Katt's dress, leaving her in the alley naked.

Meanwhile, Terry decides to reconcile with her asshole ex-boyfriend, but when she drops by, he's in his car getting a blowjob, so she picks up a weed whacker and tells him if he gets out of the car, she's gonna cut his dick off.

And then she goes home and fucks Bobby. I can't believe I actually saw this in the theater when I was 14. Without a raincoat, even. Anyway, the last half-hour shifts gears completely, as Bobby gets romantically entangled with Terry and all the main characters have to figure out who they are and what they want out of life. The usual 80's dilemmas, albeit with way more kink than most of us dealt with.

For a variety of reasons, My Tutor is clearly one of the best examples of the teen sex comedy. For one thing, it's practically swimming in tits, and even if it does attempt to wrap everything together in a sappy, everybody-wins ending, for most of it's running time, the film is about as morally vacant as you can get. Predating the modern obsession with older women and the alarming teacher-student hook-up trend by more than two decades, My Tutor presents a repercussion-free world where if it feels good, you know, do it. And that, after all, was exactly the message your average 80's teen was hoping to hear. The cast is top-notch, filled with once and future cult icons like Glover, McCarthy, Shepard, Natividad, and Shea, and for once, it looked like they tossed a few production-value dollars into the pot.

And then, of course, there's Caren Kaye, (still) the very definition of fetching, and quite liberal, at that point, with her nudity policy. And although she offered no bared skin, Amber Denyse Austin was a vision, a still-ripening peach that practically radiated with girl-magic. Unfortunately for us all, she only appeared in one other film. Fortunately for us all, it was the amazingly awful Neon Maniacs (1986), a classic badfilm howler that holds up to many (painful) repeated viewings. So we got that, at least.

Director Bowers followed this one up with the equally accomplished teen sex romp Private Resort (1985) but spent most of his career in the editing room, where he cut a number of seminal cult flicks: Galaxina (1980), The Pom Pom Girls (1976), The Beach Girls (1982), Buckaroo Banzai (1984), The Stepfather (1987), etc. He continues to work as an editor today. As for Caren Kaye, you'd think, given her near constant state of undress here, that she'd build up a long resume of sexy roles. Sadly, this was it. She spent most of her career in television, and now serves on some charity board somewhere, trying to make the world a better place. Ah, but you already have, Caren. I salute you, and your jutting nipples. May you both continue to inspire.

Availability: My Tutor is available on DVD from BCI (RIP), and as a rental from Netflix.
Get it at Amazon.


-Ken McIntyre

Teenage Pajama Party (1977)

AKA Pajama Party
New Wave Pajama Party
Sharon's Sex Party
Directed by Jim Clark
Starring CJ Laing, Sharon Mitchell, Terri Hall, Susaye London
Rated X
USA

"I'm gonna fuckin' cut ya!"
"Haha, what?"

It's a chicken and the egg sort of situation, really. What came first...dopey R-rated sex comedies, or dopey X-rated sex comedies? That's a question for the ages, I suppose, but throughout the 70's and 80's, guys like Clark, Chuck Vincent, Gary Graver, and Robert Houston churned out an endless supply of lightweight T&A flicks that could go either way, really. Teenage Pajama Party, for example, was re-released years later under the hilariously misleading title New Wave Pajama Party, with most of the hardcore snipped out. Other films had unrelated hardcore clips added in, usually to the horror of the non-porn actresses involved. Crazy times, man. Teenage Pajama Party arrived a little earlier then most, so it still smacked of early 70's grindhouse scuzz. Clark clearly aimed for art here, but landed squarely in the gutter.

A quartet (sextet? The amount seems to change a few times) of giggling girls, clearly in their 20's but dressed in babydoll dresses and pigtails to suggest a teenage (or pre-teen, depending on how creepy you are) innocence, are having a sleepover. Mom and dad (David Debin and Carol Field, a 20-something woman in a gray wig) leave for a night out on the town, trusting Barbi (Barbi James) and her friends to conduct themselves in a sane, civilized manner. This does not happen.

As soon as mom and dad split - and I mean seconds later - the girls are stripping off their clothes and dancing around to a bizarre instrumental version of David Bowie's Fame that mixes the song's pop-funk guitar with a bleating, death-drone Moog synthesizer. It's probably just some crazy fucker mashing the primitive synth's keys over a loop of the original song. Maybe they were trying to mask the fact that they stole it, because there's no way, given the ugly dimestore look of things, that they paid for licensing. Anyway, it's fucking weird.

The girls eventually slip on sheer nighties and settle down, but their evening is suddenly disrupted by a phone call from The Sheik (some uncredited middle-aged zero who looks suspiciously like Barbi's dad) who grunts into the phone and makes lewd, Black Christmas-y comments about "Ripping the girls legs apart" and stuffing 'em with his ghastly junk until they are "screaming in agony with blood running down their legs."

The dude appears to have some dark foundation make-up smeared on his face, and he's dressed in a filthy wifebeater and grungy boxer shorts. As he threatens the amused girls, he masturbates, his smallish-to-average sized penis nearly swallowed up by a thick roll of bellyfat. Said masturbation is shot in almost 3D style angles, as if Clark wants us to imagine that stubby, middle-aged member poking us right in the eye. The Shiek spews his clam chowdery goo all over the phone receiver as the girls laugh. What the fuck am I watching?

Cut to: Disco singer/soap opera actor/gay porn star Wade Nichols (RIP) as an altogether more palatable sheik with a Chester-molester mustache and a $10 tent. He bangs Barbi. The Moog goes fucking nuts on the soundtrack. Afterwards, we return to the party where the girls, now fully worked up by the creepy phone call, start making calls of their own. Sharon Mitchell (looking much prettier and less severe than her razor-thin, lesbian-haircutted 80's persona) calls some fireman, and in yet another dream sequence, former ballerina-turned-cock gobbler Terri Hall (RIP) and Candy Love, both dressed in rubber goggles and manning hoses, double team a guy in a fireman's hat (Robert Kerman, who would, like Wade Nichols, later graduate from porn stud to mainstream actor). It's a pretty psychedelic scene for 1977 and it ends, sorta surprisingly, with the girls squatting over the dude's face and peeing on him. Puttin' out the fire, I guess. And then Candy Love waddles away like a duck. Bananas.

You get the idea, right? One-time pornstress Priscilla Major, being sorta zaftig, naturally calls up a soda jerk and then imagines him eating an ice cream sundae out of her furry nether regions. That's probably why she never made another film: frostbitten vadge.

Then everybody lezzes out, and Susaye London calls up a pimp (Gilbert Palmitier) who she then imagines having sex with. While she's already having sex with Sharon Mitchell. Insatiable! Later on, CJ Laing does flips and fucks some dudes. Whatever. It all ends with mom and dad coming home to find the girls fully-clothed and snoozing away like angels. Roll credits, although not enough credits to tell you who was jammin' on that Moog.

Jim Clark shot the vastly superior Debbie Does Dallas a year later, which sorta rendered this one moot. It definitely feels moot. The fucking poster makes you think you're in for a good time, filled with laughs and hot girls, but all you get is grubby sex in weird costumes, a fat asshole making obscene phone calls, uncalled-for peeing, and Sharon Mitchell proudly displaying a Rosannadanna-esque afro. Half the cast is now dead and the rest are delusional or in hiding.

In summation: Yes, boners were popped. But they were shameful, confused boners. Oh, and I liked the dancing. And there was a tuba solo during one sex scene, so that was cool. And Candy Love looked pretty cool with the goggles. Maybe it was alright. I just have a hard time relating to movies without at least one rubber chicken joke.

Availability: Teenage Pajama Party is available on DVD from Alpha Blue Archives.

-Ken McIntyre

Meatballs III: Summer Job (1986)

Directed by George Mendeluk
Starring Patrick Dempsey, Sally Kellerman, Shannon Tweed
Rated R
Canada
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The opening of Meatballs III plays like the prequel to a slasher movie franchise. Future TV doctor Patrick Dempsey is Rudy, a shlubby nerdboy sitting in a diner reading Personal Computing magazine. Suddenly, a chesty, hot-to-trot blonde slides into his booth and starts pestering him about his summer plans, letting her index finger roam his regions while she does. Rudy can't believe his luck and attempts flirting back, when suddenly some asshole shows up and lifts Rudy's carefully placed magazine off of his lap, revealing his now-throbbing boner.
"Haha, 30.5 seconds!" Shouts the alpha-jerk, as people either clap or groan, depending on how they placed their bets. Seems it was all a little game to see how long it would take the local feeb to sprout wood. Thoroughly humiliated, Rudy attempts to escape, when the real book he's reading - 'How to Score With Lots of Horny Chicks' - falls on the floor. He'd been hiding it behind the magazine. This, of course, provokes even more rueful laughter. Rudy makes a sprint for it, away from this awful, apocalyptic scene. One girl picks the book up and chucks it at Rudy's head, braining him on the way out.

This is exactly how guys like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger got their starts. Who wouldn't plan a killing spree after some serious damage like that?

Rudy does the sensible thing and gets the hell out of town for the summer. Unlike the other Meatballs films, III doesn't even take place at a summer camp. Instead, Rudy takes a summer job working the slop bucket at a low-rent marina club-restaurant called Mean Gene's, run by it's titular owner (George Buza, Screwball Academy), a pig-nosed maniac biker who eats beer bottles and bashes anyone who ogles The Love Goddess (Shannon Tweed, naturally), who lives upstairs in a tower. Mean Gene's is populated mostly by the fuckface townies who tormented Rudy at the diner and a violent, slovenly motorcycle gang, the River Rats. So, fun job.

Rudy barely notices the near-constant abuse, however, as he is focused, laser-like, on getting laid for the first-time. Surprisingly for such a zero, Rudy already has a perfectly reasonable love interest, the Pat Benatar-ish Wendy (Isabelle Mejias), but their romantic plans are constantly thwarted by meddling parents and de-puking duties at work, so God (!) sends down a recently deceased porn star, the Mae West-y Roxy Dujour (Sally Kellerman) to get him sex. If she achieves her goal, she gets to go to heaven. Who knew God was so concerned with teenage boys' penises? Anyway, at least the horny-virgin storyline provides a few moments of decent skin-baring.


Roxy - who is invisible - takes Rudy into town for a makeover. Cue the 80's fix 'er up montage to the tune of Loverboy's The Kid is Hot Tonight (well, this is a Canadian flick, after all). This particular montage is even hinkier than usual, since it utilizes the ghost-girl gag. There's many shots of pants and boxes of condoms flying around on Ed Wood-esque 'invisible' strings.

The 'new' Rudy (dandied up to look like over-privileged yacht-trash), drops into Mean Gene's to try out his newly minted fatal charm. On the way, Roxy gives him exactly the sort of advice you'd expect from a tired old porn star with a troubled upbringing: "Remember, kid," she says, "No means yes."
Rudy takes this foolish advice, which gets him kicked in the nuts when he mauls one of the River Rats molls.

I cannot express in mere words how unfunny and depressing the endless scenes with an over-the-hill, madly-vamping Kellerman are. This entire story line has so little interest for its target audience that I just can't imagine a teenager - even a dopey 80's teen - suffering through it. It's like watching a porn flick starring your own mother. Couple this with Dempsey's repellent character - for a nerd, he's a complete and utter douchebag, even before his makeover - and you've got a seriously non-engaging experience on your hands. If it were not for the brief but eventful wet t-shirt contest at the hour mark, it is doubtful that anybody would watch Meatballs III to it's bitter end.

Anyway, the big climax devolves into cartoony slapstick as Rudy and his townie tormentor square off during a hedonistic party/competition to see who gets to fuck Shannon Tweed first before the biker gang (or speedboat gang, whatever they are) tear them limb from limb. I should point out that, in a movie where sex with Shannon Tweed is a major plot point, Shannon doesn't get naked. She's barely in the film at all. Speaking of barely there, Sabrina the Teenage Witch's chubby aunt Hilda, Caroline Rhea, is billed as Beach Girl #4. It was the future talk show queen's first role. Hard to say, but judging solely from her ample bosom, I'd say she's the jiggly chick in the red bikini playing volleyball. I know, who cares, but there's so little to cling to here, you get your kicks where you can.

In summation: on the plus side, there's a cool biker dwarf. On the downside, there's everything else.

Amazingly, Meatballs III required the services of six writers. Six people to write lines like this:
Dude in bar, post-fight: "Wow, where'd you learn those moves?"
Rudy: "Nam."
Dude: "You were in Nam?"
Rudy: "No, I went there on vacation."
Also amazingly, Meatballs III did not kill director Medeluk's career. He was on the set of Miami Vice two years later, and has been churning out television shows ever since. Dempsey is big time now. Some bullshit about a hospital. Kellerman was already 30 years into her career by Meatballs III, and she still shows no sign of slowing down. The franchise, however, was lost after this fiasco, and it would be six long years before the eye-gouging Meatballs IV, starring bummer-king Corey Feldman, would slither it's way onto video rental shelves. As of this writing, we have so far eluded any further sequels, but the inevitable remake is already looming on the horizon.

Availability: Meatballs III is the toughest of the series to find. It's available on out-of-print VHS.
Get it at Amazon for, like, $4.00.

-Ken McIntyre

Summer Job (1989)

Directed by Paul Madden
Starring Sherrie Rose, Amy Lynn Baxter, Renee Shugart, Chantal
Rated R
USA
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"Are those crushed nuts?"
"I'm afraid so."

Some of the 80's sex-coms are so evocative that they actually make me feel wistful, nostalgic, even, for those heady days of mall-culture and flash metal, when I still a sturdy young lad with a cool haircut and a closet full of sleeveless t-shirts. The good ones remind you, if you were there then, of the infinite possibilities of youth. The bad ones, on the other hand, actually make you appreciate your distance from that dull, empty-headed decade. Summer Job is one of those.

The story - if we may call a barely-sketched situation a story - revolves around stringy-haired Kathy (corpse-stiff Sherrie Rose, After School, Spring Fever USA), who has just scored a dream summer job managing a group of college-age misfits at a high-end beach resort. Her charges include a bronzed surfer dude with a majestic mullet named Bob (Dave Clouse), boy-crazy blonde Susan (Amy Lynn Baxter), obnoxious Texan cowboy Jack (James Summer), geeky virgin Herman (George O), chubby zilch Bruce (Fred Bourdin, wearing a fake, ill-fitting beer belly), bubble-headed Karen (Renee Shugart), who tells the group, at their initial meeting, that she's going for her master's degree in 'Hunkology', Barbara ( the singularly named Chantal), a severe-looking, proto-Paris Hilton rich-bitch, Donna, (Cari Mayor), a pint-sized surfer girl, and finally Tom (Kirt Earhardt), the wiseguy.

If that sounds like too many characters for one dopey comedy, it is. Although they are all ostensibly leads, most of them have little to do accept sorta hang around and pull reaction faces whenever Barbara says something snotty. In fact I'm pretty sure Mayor, Baxter, and Shuggart are in the film solely because they agreed to take their tops off, since they are required to do so in nearly every scene that they're in. Aside from the pleasingly frequent booby-flashing, however, Summer Job is deathly dull, a dead-zone of groan-worthy non-comedy. For example, there's a curious recurring gag where the cook (Sherry Reichart, who has a smashed-in Mickey Rourke face) hovers over food with a knife, slashing the air, but avoiding the actual food. If anybody cones close to her, she hits them with whatever she's supposed to be cooking, usually a chicken. It looks more like a psychotic reaction than a joke, and it's repeated several times.

Honestly, it's days like these that make me wish I finished college. Summer Job's lowest ebb occurs during an evening-out scene. Amy Lynn Baxter is sitting there at dinner with some snooty fucker. The waiter comes by and asks for their order. She says she wants crab. The waiter informs her that they're out.
"Oh, no," she sulks, "I really wanted the crabs."
Mr. Fancypants lifts an eyebrow. "I can arrange that!" He says. And then he scratches his balls.
Ick.

If there is any plot at all, it's about the rivalry between stuck-up Barbara and uptight Kathy. It all comes to a head when Barbara sneaks into Kathy's bathroom and pours purple dye into her bottle of bubble bath. Later on at the bar, Kathy shows up in a tracksuit and explains to everyone that she's been sabotaged, and now she's stained purple from the neck down. Tom listens to her explanation and then says: "My god, what happened to you?" You understand, she just fucking told him what happened. It's as if Mr, Earnhardt forgot to say his line at the beginning, so he just threw it in afterwards. This movie is positively riddled with sad little moments like this. It's like an unraveling sweater, or something. So, after she tells her tale of woe, the unsteady flurry of stillborn purple dye jokes come tumbling out:
"Haha, the purple pumpernickel!"
"I'll pump her nickel anytime, haha!"
I'll pump her nickel?
Anyway, she gets her back by putting dye in Barb's shampoo and making her work in the kitchen, where she tries to cook a rubber chicken.

There really is nothing else of consequence to report, except that at one point, the grabby middle-aged bartender that everybody hates (Jim Pelish) gets his comeuppance when he's bronskied by 400 pound burlesque legend Fannie Annie. Oh, and there's a "mystery woman" (Kathleen Neu) that Herman's been stalking the entire film. He finally gets up the gumption to talk to her. Turns out she's a hooker with some sort of bizarre Brooklyn-meets-Olive Oil accent:
"Youse don't get it, do ya?" She says. I'm a woiking goil!"

It ends, like all summer movies - and perhaps, if you are the lucky sort, like all summers - with a dance on the beach, where all the lonely hearts are finally matched up and all hard feelings are buried in the sand. Herman, now a full-blown man after an adventure out whoring with the fellas, manages to snag that garishly dressed snot Barbara. Cookie shanghais golden boy Bob. Amy Lynn seduces creaky old Mr. Burns (Hilly Gordon), the guy who owns the joint, who says "Hummina hummina hummina". The fat kid is suddenly skinny - in a day - and has sex with Kathy in a sleeping bag. Oh, and white-suited ELO offshoot band Orkestra plays an interminable song about being there for you, even in the darkness of night.


Summer Job is horrible, and not surprisingly, the acting bug died for most of the cast shortly thereafter. Amy Lynn Baxter was, briefly, a B-movie it-girl, thanks mostly to frequent appearances on the Howard Stern radio show. She supplemented her income with feature-dancing tours, which she is probably still doing, even as we speak.

Sherrie Rose apparently got over her bad acting spell, because she's done steady work in television and b-movies ever since this appearance. I mean, you couldn't be a bad actress and appear in Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, could you?

Availability: Summer Job is not currently available, unless you can snag a torrent or a dusty, out-of-print VHS copy. But my guess is you can live pretty happily without it.
If you must: Amazon has it.
-Ken McIntyre

Oddballs (1984)

Directed by Miklos Lente
Starring Foster Brooks, Donnie Bowes, Konnie Krome
Rated PG
Canada
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"With this money, I could buy a whole bunch of bricks for you to hit me with."

Foster Brooks loses a card game and ends up with his own summer camp. That's the premise behind this, one of the most clearly deranged films of the entire teen comedy genre. Directed by the man who lensed Screwballs and written by the literary genius behind Troll (but, sadly, not it's soul-obliterating sequel), Oddballs is wrong-headed on almost every level, inappropriate for any age, and almost completely nonsensical. It's the cinematic equivalent of a trauma-induced stupor, a walking head wound of a film that stumbles around as drunkenly as it's over-the-hill lead actor, a pitiable waste of time, energy, and expense that can induce a deep and lasting depression in more sensitive viewers. So, obviously, it's mandatory viewing.

As with anyone that's seen this film, I feel compelled to rattle off it's nearly non-stop litany of comedic abuses. There's the blind bus driver, for example. That's it, the whole joke. There's the 'here's your cabin' scene, where one kid finds a rotting corpse in his bed, and another camper finds a mini Dracula in his trunk. Meanwhile, Camp Bottom Out's new owner, Hardy Bassett (Foster Brooks, doing his drunk uncle routine), is outside, attempting to get a young tyke dressed in cartoon shorts, suspenders, and a pinwheel hat to show him what he's hiding behind his back. Eventually, the kid relents. It's a brick. He hits Foster Brooks in the head with it. The soundtrack goes "Boing!" Again, that's the whole joke.

So, several of the boys decide that it will be their goal at camp this summer to get laid for the first time. Unfortunately, this is an all-boys camp. Luckily, there's a girls' camp, Camp Bountiful, across the lake. Most of the girls are eighteen years old and these fuckers are only twelve, but hey, the movie's called Oddballs, right? Well, what's more odd than sex with minors? There's also the expected subplot: Skinner (Screwballs' own Donnie Bowes) is the evil land developer across the way. We know he's gotta be evil because he's got a sleazy mustache and pictures of Hitler and the Crimson Ghost on the walls of his office. Skinner's looking to cheat Bassett out of his camp so he can pave it over and build a mall. Said mall would be in the middle of the woods, but whatever. Back to the good-natured hijinks.

The pinwheel kid continues to torment Foster Brooks, so he storms out of his barbwire-wrapped cabin with a machine gun and attempts to shoot the kid. However, he slips on a banana peel (the soundtrack goes "Woop-woop-woop, bwang!") and ends up spraying bullets in the sky. One of them hits Mary Poppins, who lands in a heap and says, "That's atrocious!" before storming off. We are still, by the way, only ten minutes into the movie.

Bassett's granddaughter Jennifer (the provocatively named Konnie Krome, from the equally indispensable 80's howler Pink Chaquitas) shows up to help out, offering to be Camp Bottom Out's social director.
"But we have a social director, honey," slurs Mr. Bassett, "Billy Wankey."
"Billy Wankey?" asks Jenn, incredulous. "But he's a convicted child molester!"
"Yep," acknowledges Basset. "And he'll work for free."
"Yes, granddad," she says. "I see your point."

Oddballs has a jarring habit of slipping in an out of it's narrative, dropping all pretense of plot every so often for a series of random gags. Shortly after introducing himself to his campers, Bassett walks back into his cabin to find an ET-ish alien trying to use his phone. He shoos the little green man out the door. "From the looks of you, that wasn't going to be a local call," he says. Next, punker kid Spiz (Andrew Perkins), spies a sign on a door that says "Men". Assuming it's the bathroom, he opens it up to find it jammed with shirtless dudes in bathing suits. So he slams it shut, changes the sign to read "Women", and opens it back up again. And now it's filled with bikini-clad girls. And so on.

Billy Wankey (Anthony Newman) shows up in leatherman gear. He snorts some Amyl Nitrate and launches into a vigorous aerobics routine, has a heart attack, and dies right there, in front of the kids. Bassett runs out to see what's happened. Somebody call me an ambulance!" He demands.
"You're an ambulance!" Scream the kids.
After the corpse has been removed, the campers have lunch at the chow hall, which has skeletons painted on the walls. They feed the kids dog food, and there's supposed to be a 'thanksgiving prayer' from a guy named Mustapha, but he turns out to be a maniac with a sword, who tries to sacrifice a girl in a bathing suit.

"Take what you can kids," says Mustapha, "There's no virgins here."
That bit of nastiness over, the kids commence to eating their dog food and green fuzz.
"Mine's still purring," observes one kid.
"After chow, Nurse Brigette will be administering the antidote," says Laylo Nardeen (Mike MacDonald, not the Doobie Brother), the camp's only counselor.
Nurse Brigitte (Kimberly Brooks, Screwballs, Loose Screws), by the way, has big tits. Huge ones. The kids constantly feign illness and injury to proffer her attention. For whatever reason, this seems to always include a ball-check, so you can understand the repeat business.

Anyway, all this rampant stupidity starts to blend together after awhile. The boys raid the girls camp and change their aerobics tape to old-timey stripper-jazz so that they'll exercise more suggestively.

A martial arts instructor gets hired. He looks like Bruce Lee and all his lines are dubbed. Laylo gives a bunch of the kids Magnum PI mustaches and takes them to a singles bar, where they proceed to get loaded and hit on chicks.

And there is, of course, a game-changing dance, where scurrilous plots are revealed. In this case, Skinner discusses his plans to get Jennifer drunk and marry her off to his douchebag son, then kill Bassett and inherit the camp, so they can pave it over and build the mall. I think that was the plan, anyway. He is undone when a microphone is unwittingly turned on by a camper at just the right moment, so that everyone in the party can hear him. In the ramshackle spirit of this very special film, there's a close-up of the microphone while Skinner spews his evil plan. The microphone is, very clearly, turned off.

Despite this treachery, Basset just sells the fuckin' camp to Skinner anyway. Everybody mopes. The next morning, Basset gets breakfast, and when he looks down at his plate, he notices that his eggs and sausage are arranged to look like a face. Bassett stares at his face-breakfast and says, "Ok, you've convinced me. I won't sell the camp." I am unsure whether he says this to the campers, or his eggs.

Everybody at camp does that creepy Wicker Man dance. Skinner's son plots to kidnap Jennifer. We race to a suitably idiotic climax. Hint: there's a car chase, and a giant cake.

There is no nudity in Oddballs, but I don't think that's the result of taste and/or decorum, I just think they forgot, amidst all this fucking bedlam, to take somebody's shirt off. Wisely, director Miklos Lente did not direct another film after this, but quietly spent the next sixteen years shooting various Canadian television shows before retiring in 2000. Foster Brooks hiccupped onwards, but this remains his sole starring role. The "Lovable Lush" died of natural causes in 2001, dry as a bone. Unless you've got a stash of Dean Martin Show and Match Game episodes somewhere, then this is really the only still-circulating place to see the man's lifework in full flower. With the possible exception of Dudley Moore and myself, for real, throughout most of the 90's, Foster Brooks was the preeminent drunk-star of 'em all for decades, his every stumble and mumble a flawless dipsomaniac ballet, and, if that's your bag, you get many, many minutes of it in Oddballs. Many find it hard to believe that Mr. Brooks actually quit drinking in the early 60's, and just played tipsy for laughs for another 40 years, but that's the story. Me, there's just no way I could have gotten through that shoot without a river of whiskey. Aggressively weird and willfully moronic, Oddballs might be the very worst summer camp movie ever made. And, considering its competition (Meatballs III, anyone?), that's saying a mouthful. Hic.

Availability: Oddballs is available in the UK on a region-free PAL DVD from Pegasus Entertainment and on VHS in the US.
Buy Oddballs on Amazon.

Clip: Foster Brooks at the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast of Angie Dickinson!

-Ken McIntyre