Just One of the Girls (1993)

AKA Anything for Love
Directed by Michael Keusch
Starring Corey Haim, Nicole Eggert
Rated R
Canada

"This is all your fault. You wouldn't let him play with guns."

Further proof that it was still the 80's in Canada until at least 1997, Just One of the Girls is a gender-flipped take on 1985's boy-is-girl classic Just One of the Guys, only this one substitutes Joyce Hyser's amazing rack for Corey Haim in a cheerleader outfit. Crazy Canucks. Four years past his last (modest) hit Dream a Little Dream, and clearly suffering from Two Coreys separation anxiety, a 22-year old Haim stars as...well, Corey Haim, really. His character, Chris, is amiable but dimwitted, just like the real thing. He's obsessed with keyboards and the horrible 80's synthpop they're capable of (again, just like Haim), and Nicole Eggert is his love interest. I can imagine the pitch:
"It's the Corey Haim Story, only with cross-dressing!"

You know, if that kid stayed off drugs, he would've never made movies like this.

Just One of the Girls is so alarmingly childish that you really wonder whether it was originally written for actors ten years younger. The story - Chris vs. the neighborhood bully - seems like something out of a Little Rascals episode. Dad gives his spindly son boxing lessons in the basement, but, lacking the guts to take the lumbering giant in the Metallica shirt on, he opts for more drastic measures: borrowing his sister's clothes and dressing in drag to safely get through the school's front door every morning. In what crazy universe (besides the 80's teen movie universe, of course) would this be a viable option to a bully situation?

Surprisingly, given that he looks like Corey Haim in lipstick, Chris manages to saunter right past his tormentor wearing a wig and a polka dot dress. Not surprisingly, given the confused sexuality of most high school bullies, Kurt-the-asshole (Cameron Bancroft) finds himself powerfully attracted to this mysterious new boy-girl.
"Give me a week," he says to his cronies, after Chris/Chrissy rebuffs his advances.
So, that's creepy.

Chris has just transferred to this new school, so no one, save for his childhood chum Dan (Gabe Khouth) actually knows who he is. After all, his name is "Chris", right? That could go either way. Never mind that his school records would clearly mark him as a male, or that it's fucking obvious he's a boy. Chris just wills himself into the land of the ladies, and so it is done.He makes fast friends with cheerleader Marie (Nicole Eggert) and then tries to negotiate his way out of gym class. Dan forges a doctor's note, so his gym teacher, Ms Glatt (Rachel Hayward, Breaking All the Rules) puts him on locker-room mop duty.

Crazily, given the squeaky-clean proceedings thus far, the locker room soon fills up with nude girls, providing us with several sets of perky boobs as well as a few flashes of full-frontal. Chris can't take it, and promptly passes out. I don't blame him, really. Nothing is fresher than Canadian cantaloupes.

Marie encourages Chris/Chrissy to join the cheerleading squad. Since Chris wants to bone Marie, he agrees, and they start spending a lot of time together. Turns out, Marie is Kurt-the-bully's sister, so that's happening, as well. At one point, Chris is over Marie's house studying when Kurt barges in and starts hitting on the drag-princess.
"Kurtis, Blow!" Says Marie. It's the funniest line in the film, by far.

So, then you get to watch Corey Haim shave his legs. But, right after, you get to watch the girls' gym class jog in very bouncy slow motion. So it's a pain/pleasure sort of segment. Ms Glatt notices the thin line of drool on Chris/Chrissy's lower lip, which means either the jig is nearly up, or that she thinks there's a teenage lesbian in her ranks. She schedules a meeting after class to figure out what's going on, and he accidentally admits he's a boy, but then conjures up a backstory about trying on his sister's dress when he was 11, and the confusing mess his life's been ever since. Teach, being the understanding type, offers to counsel him, and to keep his identity secret. He's no longer allowed in the girl's locker room, however.

And so on. Dad finds a bra in Chris's room, and thinks he's gay. Ms Glatt is sure he's a mixed-up transvestite. Kurt wants to fuck him, regardless of what he's packing under his skirt. Marie has no idea her best friend is a dude. Clearly, this flimsy house of cards cannot stand. One night at cheerleading camp (!), Chris/Chrissy tries to kiss Marie, and things quickly devolve into low-grade mayhem from there. Don't worry, though. It's Canada. They're quite liberal up there, so everything works out in the end. In fact, Alanis Morrissette even shows up to jam with Haim!

There are exactly two reasons to watch this lame movie: the aforementioned shower scene (neatly clipped out of TV prints, which is where most people saw this), and Nicole Eggert in a cheerleader outfit.

I imagine it might be some sort of cult item among teenage transvestites, but T&A fans will just walk away woozy. At one point, when a justifiably pissed-off Marie faces off against her former best friend-turned sleazeball dude, Haim looks at the ground and says, "Maybe I'll get it right in the next life."

So far, the next life still looks like his best bet.
I'll keep rooting for him, though. He is my favorite Corey.

Availability: Just One of the Girls is available on DVD.


- Ken McIntyre

Getting Lucky (1990)

Directed by Michael Paul Girard
Starring Steven Cooke, Lezley Z McCraw, Rick McDowell
Rated R
USA

"Some stupid nerd threw puke water on me and Tony. This is Tony, by the way."

One of the more amateurish bits of teensploitation flotsam out there, Getting Lucky is a very low-level Troma pick-up about a nerdy high school kid named Bill (Steven Cooke), who is in love with a terminally depressed cheerleader named Krissi (Lezley Z McCraw), and is constantly menaced by a possibly gay bully/rapist/big man on campus named Tony (Rick McDowell). Like all nerds, Bill's always thinking ahead, so he looks for a part-time job to help pay for his college tuition, and that's where the trouble/story/wonderfulness starts.

Bill snags a job as the football team's towel boy, a job no one's held for more than a week. Bill finds out why pretty quickly. In a scene that is looking more and more like a gay gang rape, Tony drops his towel and demands that Bill pick it up - with his teeth.
"I think my hand would be more effective," he stammers.
"Yeah well, I bet I've got something your hand would be pretty effective on," Tony says, grabbing his crotch.
Where the fuck are we going with this, Mr. Girard?
Tony takes a thermos full of spoiled milk he found in his locker and pours it on the floor. That's got to be some sort of semen reference. Anyway, he makes Bill clean it up while the other dudes crowd around him screaming "Towel boy!" like it's some sort of slur. I fully expected Tony to pull out his angry penis next and hit Bill in the eye with it, but instead, he manages to pull himself away from the man-on-towel-boy hijinks long enough to meet Krissi at the back of the school. She's got the hots for him, for some reason. Masochistic tendencies, maybe. Or brain damage.
"I thought you were going to stand me up," pouts Krissi.
"Hey, it would take a real dildo-brain to stand up a babe as hot looking as you," Tony says, planting a wet one on her.
"Oh Tony, you know how to say just the right things," says Krissi.

The two start rolling around on the grass. Tony manages to get Krissi's panties off. She tells him she's a virgin and isn't sure she wants to go through with it - perhaps getting fucked on the ground by the school asshole wasn't exactly how she envisioned her first time - but Tony keeps up a steady stream of bullshit ("It'll be like the greatest wave you've ever felt crashing down on you"), so she decides to just let 'em at it. But before he can penetrate this ripe young beauty, Bill comes bounding out of the locker room and accidentally douses the two lovers with his bucketful of bad milk. And so ends his career as a towel boy.

Later on, Bill's wandering around picking up trash (it's his thing, recycling) when he finds a leprechaun, Lepkey (Garry Kluger), in a beer bottle. I know, who hasn't, right? So, as they are wont to do, the tiny man in the bottle (that's actually a genie, but whatever) grants him three wishes. By the way, if you're envisioning a Warwick Davis-type Leprechaun, sadly, that's not the case here. Our magical midget is just a regular dude in a costume-shop Robin Hood outfit. Bill first asks for world peace, but Lepkey admits he's not a very good leprechaun, so that's probably thinking too big. His next wish is a date with Krissi. Lepkey thinks he can handle that one. Or can he? At that exact moment, Tony and Krissi are scheming on the phone about how to hook up away from the prying eyes of Krissi's overprotective mom. The plan is for Krissi to ask nerd-boy Bill out, and then bail on him to fuck Tony. And so, just when Lepkey claims to have granted Bill's wish, the phone rings.

Dopey Bill accepts the date, of course. He takes Krissi to the drive-in. They're showing Princess Warrior, which looks way more interesting than this. She asks Bill to get her some popcorn, and then sneaks away to Tony's car. After fumbling around with condoms forever, he settles on a handjob, but is rudely interrupted by Bill, who taps on the glass and tells his date that it's time to go home. They drive home in silence.

You may be wondering, at this point, where the laughs are. Well, me too. If Getting Lucky is actually some sort of existential horror film, then it's doing a bang-up job, because this is one of the most depressing, soul-sucking movies I think I've ever seen. If it's supposed to be a comedy, holy smokes, things are going badly.

Having failed at the date, Lepkey grants Bill a wish for a car (he asks for a Ferrari, but gets a Pinto), and when he's getting bullied by Tony, the leprechaun causes the asshole to beat himself with his own tennis racket, and then to shove it up his own ass. He gets carried away by paramedics, the racket tucked firmly but safely between his thighs.

A word, if I may, about Lezlie Z McCraw. You get used to bad, amateurish acting in these kinds of movies, but our girl Lezlie goes way beyond bad into this somnambulant non-acting fugue state. Her delivery is so distant, so eerily not-there-at-all that you start to wonder just what drugs she's on. My guess is a Nyquil/Valium cocktail. Also, in three-quarters of her scenes, she's being mauled by Tony. He almost always has his fingers jammed deep into her crotch. And yet, she never shows any signs of discomfort, even when the scene calls for it. Almost as if she's used to such brutish behavior. She's just fuckin' bizarre, man. Just what is your game, Lezlie Z? Please let me know, because you are freaking me out.

Anyway, Krissi has a change of heart and starts dating Bill. He takes her out for a round of miniature golf, and things go pretty swell. Afterward, however, he starts to wonder if she's really over Tony. Lepkey turns him into a cat, so he can spy on her. So, there he is, in cat form, getting stroked by Krissi, when Tony barges in.
"When I was in the hospital this afternoon and they were pulling the tennis racket out, all I could think of was you."
He actually says that. She rebuffs him and he tries to rape her while Bill-the-cat watches. Does any of this sound funny yet? Well, just wait until you hear what's next.

The next day, after the attempted rape hubbub dies down, Bill and Krissi are going to ride their bicycles to school together. Bill wants to adjust her brakes or something first, and his wrench is the wrong size. He asks Lepkey to change it for him, and the drunken little moron screws it up and shrinks Bill down to microscopic size. So he's stuck on Krissi's bike seat. She thinks he bailed on her, so she jumps on her bike and heads to school, while tiny Bill holds on for dear life inside her underwear. This effect is achieved by what looks like two sheets slung from the ceiling and some dyed rope to represent her vagina hair. The fake Supertramp song on the soundtrack during all of this goes "We can't get much closer, we can't get much closer..." Krissi goes to class, and in his attempts to climb his way out of her panties, Bill stimulates Krissi with such fervor that she has a screamy orgasm right at her desk.

After class, Krissi has cheerleader practice, and then she hits the showers. So there's a shower scene, at least. At some point, Bill falls out of her vagina and lands on the shower floor. Then he rolls around in bubbles for awhile. Lepkey finally figures out how to get Bill back to normal size, but he realizes he left his glasses and wrench in Krissi's vagina. This could prove fatal, but luckily, the offending objects just materialize in her underwear.

I don't know how/why this happens, but in the next scene, Bill's getting paddled by the principal. It's shot like man-on-manPOV porn. Halfway through, Lepkey gives the principal a heart attack. And then we move on.

Etc.

I'll give Getting Lucky this much: the last half-hour is so loony, there's just no way you could predict any of it. It's incredibly random. Horse fights? Shish Kebab duels? It's pretty nuts. It's also pretty tedious. Clearly, Girard tried his damnedest to bash out an entertaining film on a shoestring, but there are so many things wrong with this film that it's just a lost cause, really. Still, the film has developed a fervent cult of badfilm enthusiasts who will gush with Troll 2-esque passion about the panty debacle or Bill's playin'-the-sax-while-skateboardin' buddy, or the barbarian (spoiler alert!), but the whole mess just gave me a headache.

That being said, I'm still going to dig up some of Girard's post-Lucky films. Bikini Med School has got to be awesome. Right?

PS: If you never want to see any of these actors again, then your wish - wink, wink - is granted. Most of them never acted again.

Availability: Getting Lucky is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre

Campus Man (1987)

Directed by Ron Casden
Starring Jim Dye, Kim Delaney, Morgan Fairchild
PG
USA

"If I see 30 dwarves coming out of a Volkswagon, you're dead meat."

In Campus Man, an opportunistic huckster named Todd (John Dye) finds himself in a proverbial pickle when his scholarship at Arizona State falls through, and he's left with a $10,000 tuition bill. He's given a 30-day grace period to scrape up the dough, or he'll be expelled. His previous get-rich-quick scheme, a Girls of ASU calendar, didn't quite pay the bills, so he decides to go the other way completely, and produce a beefcake calendar based on the hunky good looks of his best friend/roommate, swim-team star Brett (Steve Lyon, Valet Girls).

I know what you're thinking: sounds sorta gay porn-y. Well, just wait until the shower scene.

First, however, we meet Cactus Jack. Mr. Jack (Miles O'Keefe, the vine-swinger himself from 1981 howler Tarzan, the Ape Man) is some sort of mysterious loan-shark who advertises on bright yellow flyers. Todd finds one after being tossed out of every bank in Phoenix and meets the glowering man-in-black in the desert. Jack (Or 'CJ', as Todd likes to call him) wears tight jeans and hair-gel and carries around a briefcase full of cash and a gun.

Todd explains his idea for an all-male pin-up calendar to CJ, and at first, he is not so into it. "You got the wrong guy for that kinda shit," he growls. But Todd eventually wears him down and he hands him $12,000 in cash, which our bright-eyed entrepreneur must pay back in 30 days with 30% interest. If not, "We'll meet back here," hisses CJ. "Only we won't have as much fun."
I'm not sure what that means. Sorta felt like sodomy would be involved.

Money secured, Todd needs to find a willing crew to produce his calendar, so he begs his frienemy Molly (the Molly Ringwald-esque Kathleen Wilhoite, instantly recognizable from her role as the screwy punk rock medium Zarabeth in Witchboard (1986), editor of the school paper, to help him. She agrees, and from there, it's a man-hunt. Todd finds a bunch of willing calendar boys from the school's various sports teams, but has yet to convince Brett. So he barges in on the dude while he's taking a shower with the rest of the swim team.

This is not the first time a teen comedy has had a men's shower scene - there's one in genre classic The Cheerleaders (1970). But in that, the dudes were lathering up Stephanie Fondue. And she's nowhere to be found in this one.

Brett agrees (there's an uncomfortable on-his-knees moment there, when Todd feigns an injury) and they get to work. The next several minutes are taken up with the calendar shoot, shot 80's montage style, while Timbuk 3's "My Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" plays on the soundtrack. It was at that moment when I remembered that, besides the Replacements and a decent hairline, I really kinda hated the 80's. The calendar-release party Todd throws afterward, where people drink Perrier and dance to Corey Hart and chubby girls with seriously bad hair primp in the bathroom mirror, certainly does not help.


At this point, you may be wondering if there are girls in this at all. Well, there's one. Future primetime TV star Kim Delaney (NYPD Blue, CSI, Law and Order, etc) is Dayna, Brett's love interest. But we only get a couple glimpses of her, and even then...where'd that bathing suit come from, 1956?

Meanwhile, over in New York City, Katherine Van Buren (Morgan Fairchild!) is holding court at Image Magazine. "We need a new image at Image," she says. She explains her new concept to her staff: she wants to find a "Man of the 80s" to splatter all over their January 1988 issue and then exploit on shows like 'Letterman and Donahue.' I don't know what she's talking about, but somehow, she got a copy of Todd's Calendar and decides to use Brett as her Man of the 80's. This comes at a good time, because after he paid his tuition, Todd had no money left to pay Cactus Jack, and now has to give him double the dough or it's sodomy-in-the-desert time. Van Buren takes them out drinking and does her best to talk Brett into it.

Despite the profit potential, Brett doesn't want to do it, because it would upset his precious diving team, but when he finds a threatening letter from Cactus Jack, he decides to help his insistent friend out. He signs the contract and then competes in a diving competition. The way they shot it, it seemed like there was at least a 10% chance that he'd smack his head on the diving board and die, bringing a merciful end to Campus Man, but alas, he scored "9 Bingo".

So, Brett finds out that because he signed the Image contract, he's off the team. Some bullshit about his amateur status. He gets so mad at Todd that he moves out.
"Our friendship was really special," he sniffs. "It didn't need anything from the outside."
With a tear in his eye, he picks up his bag, says, "I think we should just avoid each other for now. I just need some time to think."
This is a conversation between two dudes, mind you.

Luckily, he runs into Dayna and makes out with her, and then Todd goes to a biker bar and gets his stupid face mashed, which alleviated a bit of the homoeroticism gently wafting through this film. But then Cactus Jack saves him, and we're back to man-on-man awkwardness.
"You know, Todd," Molly says, as she slaps a cold steak on his swollen eye, "Everything about you is undesirable."
Yeah, exactly.

A bunch of stuff happens, and there's a surprise ending. Cactus Jack takes the gel out his hair to reveal some kind of Eastern European mullet. That's not the surprise, but it was sorta surprising.

Oh, and there's one of those giant 80's mobile phones. Those are always interesting.

Devoid of nudity, laughs, or fun of any kind, Campus Man has nonetheless maintained a cult following over the years. I can only assume that this cult is comprised of gay adolescent males and Morgan Fairchild fetishists. And there's probably a lot of overlap between those two groups.


Director Ron Casden did not make another film, but he did direct The Eyes Have It, a make-up application how-to video by Donna Mills. Which explains everything, really.

Availability: Campus Man is available on DVD.

-Ken McIntyre