Bikini Summer (1991)

Directed by Robert Veze
Starring Melinda Armstrong, David Millbern, Kelli Konop
Rated R
USA

“Chester and his friends seem like fine, responsible young adults.”

Bikini Summer is not a film of many surprises. In fact, the most surprising thing about Bikini Summer is the fact that it took until 1991 for someone to make a film called Bikini Summer. Bikini Summer is about as generic a beach sex comedy as you could possibly make – and with all the fluoro bikinis and bleached blonde hair going around in 1991, you could make a very generic beach sex comedy indeed.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. Not every film needs to be filled with intratextual meta-referencing. Really, given the complete hash of that sort of thing most films tend to make, it might be better if very fewer films even attempted it. Luckily, Bikini Summer is so straight-forward that you could probably lay out the plot right now without even having to be told what it is.

It’s about bikinis. In summer.

It does, in its favour, look particularly good. That’s very likely less to do with one-time writer and director Robert Veze than it is to do with cinematographer Ken Blakey. The film was his first full-length feature after leaving the world of fashion and glamour photography, and it shows. Girls in bikinis are filmed in unbelievable, graphic close-up, with stringently careful lighting. If there was a blu-ray version, it’d blow your fucking mind, man.

Later on, things get a little less careful and more gloomily lit, as if the producers were running out of money and time. “Fuck the lighting and get this thing in the can, Blakey! We gotta ship this VHS out to video shops tomorrow!”

Anyway, there’s plenty of movie before the gloom sets in. The credit sequence alone features more jiggling and jogging bikini clad girls than some lesser sex comedies.

Sadly, it’s all a dream. Absurdly blue-eyed, good natured slacker Chet (David Millbern, Slumber Party Massacre) has been asleep, and wakes to this:

Old Mr Patterson, whose beach front property Chet and his friends are house-sitting and repainting over the summer, is going through the virtues of horizontal brush strokes versus vertical brushstrokes when using oil based paints. His wife, by the way, is played by Katherine Victor (RIP), star of The Wild World of Batwoman.

Chet rushes them out the door – and throws their bags after them. While they’re packing the car, Mrs Patterson says something you should really never say in a sex comedy: “Chester and his friends seem like fine, responsible young adults.” It’s like the antics and mayhem equivalent of saying Candyman into the mirror.

Back inside, Chet has lost his camera, which proves a convenient chance to introduce the rest of the characters. There’s annoying preachy environmentalist Richie (Alex Smith), rock and roll chick Jazz (Shelley Michelle), bikini designer Renee (Kelli Konop), blonde hottie Cheryl (Melinda Armstrong) and, last but not least, burping but otherwise silent fat party dude Mad Dog (Kent Lipham, RIP).

Even at this early point, you can already safely assume that Renee will end up making out with Chet and also wear a bikini by the end of the film, because she’s blonde and wears glasses.

Chet and his camera head for the beach, and so do Richie and Cheryl, though they all do so separately; it’s a segmented kinda film like that. Richie annoys innocent people by preaching about the dangers of UV rays and – bizarrely, given his environmental stance – handing out fliers to everyone he sees. Chet meets some girls and convinces them to pose for him, but forgets to take the lens cap off.

Cheryl meets a muscly guy with white shorts and a mullet named Brad. “Hi. I’m Brad,” he says gruffly. He asks her out to a party later on, and she accepts.

Also on the beach are requisite sex comedy nerds Larry (Thom DeLorenzo) and Gary (Tommy Heisler). Larry has, hands down, the funniest lines in the entire film, and says all of them in this single clip. Then he remains woefully underused for the next hour.

Incidentally, the girl they’re checking out is porn star Missy Warner, who had a similar beach related cameo in Bikini Car Wash Company.

Meanwhile, Jazz has just found a new rehearsal room for her all girl hard rock band, Jailbait. They’re renting a room in a warehouse from a sleazy landlord named Max (Ken Davitian), who looks very much like two Dom DeLuises jammed into an office chair.

Chet finds some more girls to photograph, and while he manages to run out of film, things do take a turn for the saucy. “Listen,” one of them says, “this is okay and everything, but if we could go back to your studio, we could do some really sexy stuff.”

He immediately heads out and buys $200 worth of studio equipment in anticipation of the girls coming over the next morning.

Richie continues to find more people to annoy. First he scares off poor Missy Warner by jabbering on about bacteria in sand. Then he finds two more girls to annoy, but it turns out they’re smarter than him.

They anticipate everything he’s got to say on numerous topics, including rainforests, dolphins, UV rays and native Americans. He gets bored of being made to look stupid, so he wanders off and manages to find a protest. Seems like someone is planning on building condominiums or something.

There’s only six people there and no one around to watch, but Richie joins in with enthusiasm anyway. However, it’s not long before the cops arrive to break things up, along with the local assistant DA, Rachel Greene (Rebekah Alfred). You can safely assume that she’ll also end up in a bikini by the end of the film because she wears glasses and is played by someone who spells Rebecca with a ‘k’ and an ‘h’.

Richie’s all for hanging around, but protest organiser and white bearded hippy Moondog (Michael Silverback) isn’t having a bar of it. “Listen,” he says. “I spent half the ‘60s in the slammer. I missed Woodstock. I missed Monterey. I don’t plan on missing the ‘90s.”

Sadly Richie can’t take a hint and ends up getting himself arrested. Renee bails him out and tells him that she can’t afford to do it again, but he just keeps mumbling about having to save the beach.

If Moondog knew the kind of music he was going to have to put up with for the rest of the decade, he probably wouldn’t have been so worried. As if to make that exact point, Jailbait’s rehearsal continues and Jazz sings a song with some of the most wretched lyrics outside of my high school notebooks: “Justice is blind, and you got cash/If you don’t, your head they’ll bash/Mr Bush does not tax the rich/Isn’t that sort of a bitch?”

Having perfected that number, one by one they celebrate with an after rehearsal shower. Max has a peephole installed in his office for just that sort of occasion, and we get to sit through each of them in there while he cackles away.

They eventually find out and go and confront him and then go home or something.

Meanwhile, Cheryl is at the party, but can’t find Brad. Turns out he’s up in one of the bedrooms banging some other girl. “C’mon Cheryl, be cool,” he says. “Cheryl, don’t be a downer.”

She doesn’t seem to think that’s a reasonable request, so she goes and gets hammered. Next morning, she wakes up on a deck chair by the pool, then strips off and goes for a swim.

Then we get five minutes of slow motion, fully naked splashing around. It’s pretty spectacular.

After she gets out, she finds out that she’s been watched the whole time by a piano playing guy named Bert Harden (Carmen Santa Maria) who appears to have stolen Bobby Dall from Poison’s hair.

He tries to explain that he was inspired by her nudity to finally finish the song he was writing, but she’s not into it and storms out.

Chet’s having more luck. The girls arrive for the photo session, only to find that they don’t have anything proper to wear. So Chet borrows two of Renee’s designs.

This turns out to be such an inspiringly good idea he becomes a silhouette.

Also a fancy backdrop and a water feature appear.

Or maybe that bit is a dream. Who knows. Anyway, when he next speaks to Renee (in the totally dark lounge room with everyone else) she’s despondent because she thinks her bikinis have been stolen. Nope – Chet’s sold them to the girls for double the price.

This leads him to come up with an idea: they should hold a bikini contest. Renee could sell her designs to the entrants, and Chet could take pictures! And they could use the money to save the beach! And Jazz’s shitty band could play! And Cheryl could wear a bikini! And Mad Dog could drink beer!

So they do just that.

Richie invites Missy Warner and the smart girls who made him look bad.

And Cheryl takes an invite to Bert’s, while wearing a sling bikini.

Then it’s time for the contest! Sadly, it’s the kind of gloomily lit part of the film, but nonetheless. Even Missy Warner enters, although she complains to Renee about her bikini in the dressing room. “There just seems to be so much fabric...”

Unfortunately, they’ve barely finished going through the contestants when the assistant DA and the cops show up, along with sleazy landlord and apparent condo developer Max. Renee defends her bikinis to the DA in an admirably eloquent fashion.

But will they get to continue the party? Will Renee end up wearing a bikini and making out with Chet? Will the DA wear a bikini? And hey wait, weren’t they meant to be painting a house or something?

Predictably, the answer to all four questions is yes, but the manner in which it all comes together is brilliantly and insanely coincidental, and provides the movie’s few surprises. It’s generic, segmented and silly, but Bikini Summer is still a lot of fun. It’s far from the best beach sex comedy, but it’s a long way from the worst too.

- Alistair Wallis

The Resident (2011)

Directed by Antti Jokinen
Starring Hillary Swank, Jeffery Dean Morgan, Christopher Lee
Rated R
UK/USA


"This time you get to be awake."

Hillary Swank won two Academy Awards. I don't know that much about how Hollywood works, but wouldn't that somehow make you rich enough so that you wouldn't have to star in schlocky horror flicks? Well, to be fair, The Resident is high-class schlock, so I guess that makes it alright. Directed by a Finnish music-video guru for the recently revamped Hammer, it's a tawdry tale about a compulsive masturbator who builds a labyrinth of hidden walls in the New York apartment building he manages and drills peepholes into people's apartments. Then he rents out to pretty ladies so that he can spy on them. It's a pretty sweet set-up for a lonely guy, really.

Of course, this particularly lonely guy, Max, is portrayed by Jeffery Dean Morgan, AKA the Comedian from Watchmen, which seems like very strange casting to me. I mean, look at that fuckin' guy. If he's got to hide in the walls for sexual gratification, where  does that leave the rest of us? Why not get an actual sniveling creep for the role, like...I dunno, Eddie Deezen or Booger from Revenge of the Nerds? Or even the entire cast of Revenge of the Nerds. We could turn this fucker into a teen sex comedy. But I digress.

Swank stars as Juliet, an uptight emergency room surgeon who just broke up with her boyfriend Jack (Lee Pace, Pushing Daisies) for cheating on her. Since he's sullied their love nest, she's forced to find a new place to live, so she answers an ad suspiciously taped to a bulletin board at work for a cheap ($3800 a month is cheap? New York is fucking crazy) apartment in an old, stately building. Said building is run by Max (Dean Morgan) and his ancient grandpa August (Christopher Lee, in his first Hammer flick since '79's To the Devil a Daughter). She likes it and Max likes her, so she takes it and moves in.

Almost immediately, Juliet starts to get creeped out by all the weird noises she hears at night. Luckily she's distracted by her handsome and helpful landlord, and the two start to develop a relationship. Sadly for Max, she's not over Jack yet, as evidenced by a hilariously overwritten scene where Max tries to make out with her and she says "I can't, I only know Jack's lips!" Haha, what? Anyway, that bums Max out, but luckily, he's still able to peep at her through all the holes he's drilled into the walls, so pretty much every night he just stares at her taking baths and rubbing lotion on her belly while he quietly masturbates and weeps in the secret hallway behind her place.

By the way, for a film that's clearly going for a tasteful display, there's a ton of Swank-in-her-skivvies shots, and at least two shower/bathtub scenes. They're shot through a plastic curtain, but I'm gonna say that still counts.

Also, while we're on the subject of gratuitous female objectification, if you're still on the hot-or-not fence regarding Hillary, this movie will only confuse you further. In the multitude of Swank jogging shots - she goes for like 20 runs in this movie - she looks very much like a sorta homely teenage boy.

And then there's a bunch of other shots where she's drop-dead gorgeous. What the hell, Hillary Swank? What kind of boner-confusing alchemy is this?

Anyway, back to business. Juliet starts to suspect something weird is afoot, especially when she keeps getting up late for work every morning. This probably has something to do with the fact that Max has been using crazy grandpa's knock-out meds to dose Juliet every night so that he can bang her in her sleep.

She gets a bunch of cameras rigged up so she can find out what's going on. Once she sees the horrifying evidence, things get crazy.

She and Max battle it out with power tools and knives and bloody mayhem ensues.

I don't think I've ever watched a Hillary Swank movie before. She's mostly into drama, and I'm mostly into laffs and boobs. And while The Resident will not compel me to watch any of her boring highbrow films, I will say I thought she was great in this. So was Dean Morgan, even though, as mentioned, he's way too good-looking for the role. I can see, however why accomplished actors were cast for this - the first hour is just a very slow-boil, and with the usual blonde Hollywood lame-brains, it would have been a fairly excruciating experience. And you are rewarded for your patience with the climactic orgy of blood and screaming. The Resident is no genre classic, but it is a tight and well-crafted stalker flick, and very much in step with the sort of stuff Hammer did in the 70's, minus the accents and wigs and whatnots. Good stuff.



- Ken McIntyre

Porky's (1982)

Directed by Bob Clark
Starring Dan Monahan, Kim Cattrall, Chuck Mitchell
Rated R
Canada


"I've never seen so much wool. You could knit a sweater."

Director Bob Clark (RIP) was always an innovator. He was the first director to utilize the make-up talents of future horror-fx superstar Tom Savini (Deathdream, 1972), he is widely considered the godfather of the slasher film (Black Christmas, 1974), and created the first Christmas-themed film that even people who hate Christmas still adore (A Christmas Story, 1984). But perhaps more importantly, at least to millions of horny teenage boys, Bob Clark invented the modern teen sex comedy.

Anyone with even a passing interest in pop culture is probably aware of Porky's and the impact it's had on filmmaking in the past thirty years. Budgeted at a meager 4 million, it made over a hundred million dollars in the US alone, and was a smash hit all over the world. Also, despite being shot in Florida with an American director and a mostly-American cast, Porky's remains the biggest-grossing Canadian produced film of all time. The movie's financial success still pales in comparison to its cultural significance, however. More than any other film of the era, Porky's established the formula for the teen sex comedy genre, a blueprint that's been used over and over, from Screwballs to American Pie, in hundreds of films. Porky's has it all: a virginal underdog, a gang of rag-tag misfits, a hot teacher, a despicable villain, equally despicable authority figures, a dab of social commentary, and, most importantly, a shower scene. They had existed before, of course, most notably in women's prison flicks of the 70's, but after Porky's, almost no other R-rated teen flick in the next two decades went without at least one visit to the girls' locker room showers. After Porky's, many similar films were judged entirely by how awesome the shower scene was. In fact, the term "shower scene" only entered American vernacular after the success of Porky's.

Porky's admittedly thin story line sprang from the teenage experiences of director Bob Clark, growing up in Florida in the 1950's. Essentially, underachieving Pee Wee (Don Monahan) wants to get laid. His friends decide the only way to make that happen is to take a trip out to the everglades, to a notoriously unhinged strip club called Porky's, named after its fat-bastard owner, Porky Wallace. Their trip is disastrous, and they vow revenge. Besides some adolescent hjinks and school-day sexcapades along the way, that's pretty much the whole story. Simple, but effective.

As the story begins, we meet our hero, Pee Wee, who wakes up and does the same thing he does every morning - measures his penis with a ruler, hoping it got bigger overnight. Alas, it did not, and so Pee Wee shuffles off to school, where he meets up with his prank-loving pals.

After a long day spent trying to see their gym teacher naked, the fellas head out to shack in the woods to have sex with a hooker delightfully named Cherry Forever - played, also delightfully, by Webster's mom, Susan Clark.

Anyway, it's all just a goof to scare the fellas. They hire a guy to pretend to be Cherry's angry boyfriend and mayhem (and full-frontal male nudity) ensues.  Naturally, a naked Pee Wee ends up getting picked up by the cops. Everybody dumps on ol' Pee Wee, all the time. The very next day, Wendy Williams - who actually went out on a date with Pee Wee - gives him a giant condom for being "The biggest dickhead in the world". Clearly, something needs to change.

The fellas decide they all need to go to Porky's, a notorious stripclub/divebar 70 miles away, in the Everglades, where "anything goes. And so they do.  Porky's is some kind of crazy redneck paradise where they let underage kids in, no questions ask, where topless strippers brawl with drunken cowboys, where the bouncer loungers in a machine gun-mounted wheelchair, and where, if you've got enough cash, you just make it upstairs, where god knows what will happen to you.

The fellas meet Porky (Chuck Mitchell, a real monster of a man), who agrees to let the boys have at three of his girls for a hundred bucks. But of course, it's just another ruse. He dumps them all into the moat. Adding insult to injury, the crooked sheriff (Alex Karras - Webster's dad!) shakes them down for the rest of their dough. So it turns out to be a pretty bad night.

Meanwhile, back at school, Coach Brakket (Boyd Gaines) is under the assumption that his girlfriend, Miss Honeywell (Kim Cattrall), is a virgin. Coach Warren (Doug McGrath) assures him that if he gets her upstairs in the gym's storage room, he'll find out differently. So he attempts to get her upstairs all the time. He has just struck out once again when Miss Ballbreaker shows up and gives Honeywell some lip.

She gets so angry that she does, in fact, go upstairs, and then the big secret is revealed. They store old uniforms up there, and the smell of a men's locker room drives Honeywell into a fit of depraved passion. They have loud, inappropriate sex, and she howls like a dog. Hence her nickname, Lassie. Also, you get to see Kim Catrall's naked ass, which is pretty awesome.

And then, we are treated to the greatest full-bush teen sex comedy shower scene of all time. The mother of all shower scenes.

Unfortunately, the fun ends prematurely when Pee Wee, frustrated because his peephole is obstructed by the plus-sized ass of a girl affectionately known as Blubberman, blows their cover. The girls figure out what's up and  they're pretty amused by it, but then one of the fellas sticks his penis through the peephole, and things got south pretty quick from there. Ballbreaker shows up, and the Greatest Shower Scene of All Time turns into the Most Painful Penis-yanking Scene of All Time.

Ballbreaker wants to set up a penis line-up to identify the shower-peeper, but the principal has a giggle-fit when she explains it to him.

Then there's some bullshit with the racist kid and his dad at a party, and just when things get under control again, Mickey stumbles in, covered in blood. He'd been consistently trying to get revenge on Porky this whole time, and every time he comes home, he's a little more battered. This time, he ends up in an ambulance.

Surely you must know, this means war.

Shwartz cooks up a plan, and the boys (and the coach, and a cop), get to work. The plan pretty much involves tearing Porky's down piece by piece. There's distressed strippers and spilled booze everywhere. While this is happening, the sheriff shows up to kill everybody.  But the fellas rigged his car, too, and he ends up in the swamp with the rest of the assholes. And once the whole joint is reduced to splinters, they blow whatever is left up.

Porky and his bro chase the kids to the county line, but once they get there, further humiliation awaits. In fact, you almost start to feel bad for the fat creep.

But wait, what about Pee Wee? Does he finally get laid? I mean, that's what this was all about, right?

Yeah, man. Everybody gets laid!

While it has certainly been trumped, in terms of onscreen nudity and teenage hijinks over the years, and while its fitful attempts at addressing race-relations seem awkward and out-of-place, Porky's nonetheless still holds a special place in the heart of every lusty teenager who stumbled across it over the past thirty years. Clark captured the engorged id of every adolescent American boy better than anyone ever had before. As a former adolescent American boy myself, I can say for certain that boozing, pranks, and going after pussy really are the chief preoccupations for men of a certain age, regardless of the era they grew up in, and Porky's represents those magical years perfectly. It was quickly followed by two sequels and hundreds of rip-offs - and still is - but there's nothing quite like the original. It almost makes me feel bad for today's youth, and their easy access to pornography. In 1982, Porky's was teenage America's porn, and Kim Catrall was teenage America's greatest porn star. If you've never taken a trip to Porky's, a I highly recommend you do. Just be sure to bring some rubbers and a Fake ID.




- Ken McIntyre