Hamburger the Motion Picture (1986)

Directed by Mike Marvin
Starring Leigh McCloskey, Debra Blee, Dick Butkus, Chuck McCann
Rated R
USA

"Excuse Mr. Belknap, but there's a dead woman in the drive-thru lane."
"Well then, cancel her order."

There are those among us that will swear, without irony or apology, that Hamburger the Motion Picture is the greatest, erm, motion picture ever made. And while they are obviously crackpots, they are not entirely wrong. The truth is, Hamburger is goofy 80's junk, but it's one of the finest examples of goofy 80's junk imaginable, a veritable smorgasbord of eye-rolling gags, gratuitous nudity, inappropriate stunt casting, and headache-making soundtrack music. As such, at the very least, it is clearly the greatest 80's fast-food themed teen-comedy ever made. And while it is too competent to compete with the likes of Troll II, it is also a worthy competitor in the 'Best/Worst' film sweepstakes as well. So yes, it is pretty fucking great.

First sign that you're in for a good time: the theme song is awesome. "Hamburger for America" by Michigan rock legend Bill "Blue" Mueller is a maddeningly catchy blues-pop song that really does say it all about hamburgers, and about America: "Sliced tomatoes, cheese and bacon/Soda pop, and shakes a shakin'/And while you're listening and lookin'/It makes them proud, that they're a-cookin'/Hamburgers, for America!"
Once heard, you will probably never forget it. For better or worse.

Second sign that you're in for a good time: Hamburger the Motion Picture actually opens with a shower scene. Russell (magnificent bastard Leigh McCloskey, who would later become an enduring soap opera heartthrob) is caught banging a coed in the girl's shower. He is sent to see the school psychiatrist, Victoria Gotbottom (exploitation vet Karen Mayo-Chandler, RIP), who, of course, has sex with him. That's his problem, you see. Chicks dig him, and he very much enjoys boning chicks. So, the dean walks in on them, and he gets expelled.


Back at home, Russ's dad (Bob Hogan) explains to his cocksman son exactly why he must change his randy ways. Seems he stands to inherit $250,000 from his grandfather, but will not receive a cent until he gets a college degree. Unfortunately, he's already been expelled from four universities for sexual misconduct, and now his parents have no money left to send him anywhere else. The two men sit there, pondering this sticky issue, when an ad pops up on the television for hamburger college. It's sponsored by a fast food chain called Busterburger. Graduates receive a real degree, and it's free! Prayers answered, Russ heads over to the nearest Busterburgers to apply.

Busterburgers is a yellow and red monstrosity of a place, with gimmicky steer horns poking off of the roof and jutting from the employees' caps. Clearly, Kevin Smith looked to Hamburger the Motion Picture for inspiration when he wrote Clerks II, because the look of Busterburgers and Smith's fictional burger joint, Mooby's, is nearly identical. One thing Mooby's did not have, however, was a smart-ass six-foot pickle at the drive-thru. Buster's order-taking pickle calls women "Toots" and sounds like a sarcastic Snagglepuss. He sasses one old woman so badly she has a heart attack and dies right there. Sarcastic Pickle is awesome.

Russ picks up an application and hops on a bus to burger college. As you would expect, it's filled with screwballs and misfits, including a twitchy nun, Sister Sara (Barbara Whinnery, Stewardess School) a militant Latina, Conchita (former Playboy bunny Maria Richwine), a suspenders-sporting nerd named Nacio (Jack Blessing), a fat guy, Prestopopnick (John William Young) a clueless, would-be ladies man, Fred Domino (Sandy Hackett, Buddy's son) and a Rick James doppelganger named Magneto Jones (Chip McAllister). Chuck McCann is a goggle-eyed professor. Dick Butkus is Drootin the drill sergeant, which is a weird thing for a college to have. Also lurking around the joint: skull-faced Lyman Vunk (Charles Tyner), Busterburger's founder, his helium-voiced, bra-straining trophy wife (Randi Brooks) and his daughter Mia (b-movie queen Debra Blee), Russ's obvious love-interest.

Buster University has strict rules. There is no alcohol, drugs, sex, or outside food allowed. The students are forced to sleep in hamburger shaped beds and talk into hamburger shaped phones. They take burger-related classes, like onionology (everybody sobs), cow-butchery class (Mia chops up a wooden bull with a chainsaw; the wooden 'testicles' roll across the floor and the fat kid pours salt on one and chomps into it), and, um...pickle midwifery. If these jokes sound lame on paper, just wait until you actually watch them. It's aggressively stupid stuff, and it's relentless.

At one point, Fred and Russ go out for Chinese food, where they see Mia and Mrs Vunk having dinner.
"Look," Fred says, "It's Mia and her mom. Mama Mia!"
They join the women. Mrs. Vunk says,"You haven't lived until you've tried their Sum Young Guy!"

Sigh.

So, they're eating when Dick Butkus shows up. Not only has he been dating Mia, but eating outside is strictly forbidden for students, so Russ and Fred dive under the table. Butkus, of course, imposes himself and gobbles down some ribs while the two idiots are hiding under the table. Fred, being at vagina level with the ladies, cannot help himself. He starts nuzzling Mrs.Vunk's crotch. She has a screaming orgasm, upending the table and revealing the two culprits. As punishment, they are both put in pickle jail, which is, in fact, a giant pickle.
"Oh no," Fred cries. "We're in a pickle!" Indeed you are, sir.

Russ tries to stay out of trouble. While Fred sneaks off to bang Mrs. Vunk, he stays in his room to study for finals. Unfortunately, his sexual charisma is so pervasive that Conchita busts into his room and forces him to have sex with her at gunpoint.


Also, the nerd guy starts turning into a chicken, for some reason (he lays an egg at one point).


Part of the final exam involves all the students running a Busterburgers for the day. A busload of fat people show up ("Oh no, it's the eating club!") and order hundreds of burgers. There's about ten minutes' of footage that is nothing but fat people stuffing burgers into their maws while pig noises play on the soundtrack. They try to get rid of them by putting laxatives in their food, but all the farting eventually blows up the restaurant.

Yes, you heard that right. And then some bikers show up and destroy whatever's left. And then two Mexicans with a truck full of chickens crash into the rubble. Haha, what a mess! Can the gang possibly find a way to fix this crazy jam? Of course, it's the 80's! In the end, everybody wins. Except for Dick Butkus. That guy is an asshole.

So, there you go. An utterly ridiculous movie about hamburgers. Not like today. Today, hamburger movies are dramas, like Fast Food Nation. Obesity is an epidemic in America, causing more Diabetes, heart disease, and death every year. But in 1986? Pure comedy. Almost makes you wish there was some sort of portal you could jump into and escape to the mid 1980's for awhile. Chortle at nerds and hide under tables at Chinese restaurants. But there is no such portal, so thank fuckin' Christ the VCR still works.

Hamburger the Motion Picture is a beloved cult favorite amongst 80's junkfilm fans, and will surely remain so. It is not actually funny, but it's still pretty fun, an eager-to-please dimwit of a film that will resort to anything, from aggressive gay pickles to farting fat people, to make you laugh. As for the crew and cast, although he mostly stayed away from comedies for the rest of his career, director Mike Marvin deserves some sort of merit for also producing Hot Dog the Movie. I mean, what a legacy! Most of the cast kept going after this one. 70's funnyman Chuck McCann is not dead, and is in fact still acting, most recently in Horrorween, which also features Alice Cooper, Jenna Jameson, William Shatner, and Flavor Flav. Debra Blee had a short but pretty incredible run in low budget exploitation flicks: The Beach Girls (1982), Savage Streets (1984), The Malibu Bikini Shop (1986), and Beach Fever (1987). Blee had excellent taste in film roles, and although she bared no skin in Hamburger, there's plenty more of her to admire in Beach Girls and Malibu Bikini Shop. Unfortunately, she has not acted in 22 years, and we miss her and her fleshly charms terribly.


Availability: Amazingly, Hamburger the Motion Picture remains unavailable on DVD. You can still find it on VHS for a reasonable price, though.

Clip: Hamburger the Motion Picture the Trailer!

-Ken McIntyre

Jocks (1987)

AKA Road Trip
AKA Physical Lessons
Directed by Steve Carver
Starring Scott Strader, Christopher Lee, Richard Roundtree
Rated R
USA
Shop for this poster!

"Where's your racquets?"
"Oh, I traded them last week for a couple six packs. You can't drink tennis racquets."

Can I say something? Given the title alone, I would have never seen Jocks. Who would? It sounds like gay porn. Also, nobody likes jocks, not even jocks. Maybe drunk cheerleaders, but for the most part, people hate them. The only saving grace it had was a poster that looked like some Lois Ayres aerobics porn flick. Aerobics porn was huge in the late 80's. So yeah, Jocks. Awful title. The movie? Eh. Slightly better.

Jocks boasts more well-known actors than most 80's teen flicks, which were usually crowded up with first-timers and local-yokels working for a free lunch, so it is pretty impressive to see Dracula himself, Christopher Lee, gobbling up the scenery as President White, head-honcho at LA College, a school that hasn't won a single sporting competition in ten years. He blames his mealy-mouthed head coach Bettleborn (exploitation legend RG Armstrong), a nerve-rattled bungler who thinks killing off the tennis team and concentrating on football is the way to go. Only problem is, the tennis team actually has a shot at the championship this year (this year being 1984 - it took awhile to get this one released), and so, the tennis players and their coach (Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree) have the rest of the season to win it all, or get cut out of the budget completely, thereby losing their scholarships.

So what's the problem? I mean, they're winning already, right? Well, you've got to see the motley crew of weirdoes that make up this highly unlikely tennis team. There's the berserk Ripper (Donald Gibb, AKA Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds), your garden variety psychotic, the Felix Unger-esque Jeff (Perry Lang), Andy (Stoney Jackson), a Jheri-curled, guyliner-smeared Prince wannabe, the self-explanatory Tex (Adam Mills), Chito (Trinidad Silva, RIP), a squat, Fred Flinstone-esque Latino, and the ringleader of the this perverse circus, The Kid (Scott Strader), a booze swilling cad. In other words, your usual gang of 80's feebs and fuck-ups.

The boys head to Las Vegas for the championship, where they will ultimately have to face off with their rivals, Arizona State. In time honored teen-com tradition, the ratfinks on the other team convince our heroes to spend a night on the tiles, getting them loaded and bringing them to a gonzo biker bar that they have to fight their way out of. Not surprisingly, they are wrecked the next morning and blow their preliminary matches, causing Coach Shaft to say: "Not only have you let me down, you let yourselves down."
Seriously, that old line? Amazingly enough, it works, and the team rallies, using their oddball personalities to best their opponents. Ripper, for example, threatens to kill the other guy. Andy swishes around. Jeff is so polite, his opponent feels obliged to let him win. Chito keeps hitting his knees and praying to Jesus in Spanish. Etc. Oh, and The Kid distracts his dude by pointing out a busty blonde in the front row, which at least provides us with shots of a busty blonde in the front row.

I will hand it to the writers (Mike Lanahan and David Oas), it's probably not that easy to come up with six workable tennis-related gimmicks. Unfortunately, we're still watching 20 minutes of tennis. 'Funny' tennis or not, it's pretty boring. Thankfully, they follow it up with a strip poker scene. I would surely have been fast asleep on the couch, dreaming of a more interesting movie, if they had not.

There a few minor subplots along the way - The Kid and tennis scout Nicole (future Law and Order star Mariska Hargitay) bat eyelashes at each other, RG Armstrong ends up in a motel room with a pile of prostitutes, there's some bullshit about bets and throwing the match - but all it really leads up to is yet another twenty minutes of tennis in the film's final half-hour. And that's the problem with Jocks. It's a sports movie disguised as a teen sex comedy. And how many sweaty, cellar-dwelling teenage boob-oglers, how many late-night cable surfers, how many diehard fans of Party Camp or Pinball Summer do you think were also interested in sports? Exactly. Jocks, therefore, is pretty much a zilch, a nadir, an eyeball-drying snoozefest of interest only to actual jocks. And tennis jocks, at that. I think Richard Roundtree sums this film up nicely early on when he gathers his young charges and implores them not to do anything too crazy before the big match.
"Listen," he says, "I want you guys to have a mediocre time."
Done, sir.

Steve Carver also directed Big Bad Mama (1974), starring Angie Dickinson's breasts, and The Arena (also '74), which features Pam Grier as the first female gladiator in ancient Rome, so it's not like the man has not graced us with lasting exploitation goodness. He just blew it here, is all.

Availability: Jocks is available on DVD from BCI, and as a rental from Netflix.

-Ken McIntyre

Getting It On! (1983)

AKA American Voyeur
Directed by William Olsen
Starring Martin Yost, Heather Kennedy, Jeff Edmond
Rated R
USA

Shop for this poster!

"Alex, why are we driving to the woods?"

We live in a much different world than we did in 1983. One of the most dramatic changes we've gone through in the past two decades is the intrusion of surveillance into our daily lives. I read this book on the subject a couple years ago - it might even have been called "Surveillance" - that pointed out a pretty astounding fact. In the US, you are under surveillance about 70% of the time you're outside. Whether it's the security cameras at a store or an office or a parking lot, or the traffic cameras on the streetlights, there are very few places to hide anymore. It's no wonder that voyeurism has become a national obsession, whether it's the alarming proliferation of 'webcam girls', the seemingly endless confessional video-blogs that clog up Youtube, or the general public's unquenchable thirst for celebrity dirty laundry, we just can't seem to mind our own business anymore. And not only are we being watched, but we're doing a lot of watching, as well. In 1983, not so much. Sure, there were security cameras here and there, but for the most part, people generally trusted one another not to piss in their soup or to snatch their underwear from the dryer at the Laundromat. Which brings us to our feature.

Getting It On! is about a voyeuristic teenage zero who turns his creepy hobby of spying on neighbor girls with binoculars into a thriving home surveillance business by renting out equipment to people who want to bust someone they know doing something weird. A far-fetched comedic conceit for 1983, but a clear harbinger of things to come. So, did director William Olsen have some sort of fever-driven vision of a Dystopian future that somehow came true? Did he know that we would someday live in a constant state of heightened paranoia, ducking and running from all-knowing electric eyes that clock our every move, just waiting for us to steal a cookie or fuck a whore? Or was he just looking to exploit the then-burgeoning home video business for a few cheap yucks and bucks?

Let us explore the evidence, and then come up with a crackpot theory sometime shortly after. Our hero is one Alex Carson (Martin Yost), who we are introduced to as he creeps around his new neighbor's backyard with a pair of binoculars. It's quite dark out, so he slips and falls, hurting his ankle and alerting the object of his desire, new girl in town Kelly (Heather Kennedy). Perky, cornfed Kelly comes outside to help Alex home, and doesn't even seem all that upset that she's being peeped, chalking it up to the generic immaturity of boys.
"Girls just mature faster," she tells Alex, who answers her by staring at the tiny bumps under her t-shirt.
"Maturity isn't just physical, dumbass," she says.
Good one.
It's clear that Alex has a serious developmental problem. Guys wandering around with binoculars usually require some sort of counseling. Instead, when he shows interest in starting up some sort of vague surveillance company to his all-business father, dad brokers a profit-sharing deal with him right there at the breakfast table (while mom sucks down a cigarette over her plate of eggs) and gives his weirdo kid $4,000 seed money.
Confident that his wacked-out scheme will work, Alex takes the dough and splits, looking for his best bud Nick.

Nick (Jeff Edmond) is a goofy, thick-lipped sleazebag, a sort of Mick Jagger/Vinnie Barbarino-esque clod who gets busted for passing out Polarioids of his balls to the girls in his typing class. Narrowly escaping expulsion, he bolts out of the principal's office and meets up with Alex. They go on a spending spree, buying up piles of high-end video equipment while a truly awful song by The Brains about...well, watching video tapes ("Video, I'm watching my video/ It sure looks good to me!") plays in the background.

This is the conversation the two have, while driving home in Nick's beat-up Plymouth Horizon.
Nick: "So, you gonna start videotaping now? You giving up the 'nocs?"
Alex: "Yeah. Binoculars get old after awhile."
Nick: "Who you gonna start with first, Sally?"
Alex: "Probably, yeah."

Isn't this the same sort of conversation that Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole used to have? Anyway, that's exactly what Alex does. He sets up a video camera outside and sits there, monitoring his neighbor as she walks around her room, wrapped in a towel.
"C'mon, Sally, dump the towel," grunts our slobbering voyeur, huddled behind his monitor. "Please dump the towel!"
So, that was creepy.

As with all great 80's teen movies, there's a gratuitous video arcade scene. Nick is playing Robby Roto, but when Alex ambles up, he says,
"Hey Alex, can you lend me a quarter so I can play another game of Nuclear Madness?"
Nuclear Madness? Sounds intense.

So anyway, Alex continues to shoot women undressing without their knowledge. Jeff gets in on the action and tapes his brother and his brother's girlfriend having sex (ick), and through the usual mix-ups, the tape ends up being broadcast to an auditorium full of students, including one dude who rocks the ruling combo of wraparound new wave shades and a red bandanna.

Also, I'm not sure how this happened, but they taped a bunch of girls having a pillow fight, and if you look really close, you'll notice that one of the girls is completely naked. That bit seems random, but why question full-frontal? If you really start to add these sort of scenes up, there's at least half an hour's worth of movie here that has nothing to do with the plot. Stuff just happens. Like when Nick gets busted for stealing a skin mag at the convenience store, and suddenly this little black kid saunters through the door with an oversized boombox on his shoulder. He walks up to the camera, looks it in the eye, and says, "Wanna see my radio?" And then he splits. This kind of thing happens a lot in Getting It On!.

Eventually, Alex asks Sally out on a date. Initially, his plan is to film it for whatever fucked up movie he's supposed to be making, but he decides to just play it straight instead. Then he gets whacked out of his gourd on booze and ruins the evening. I should admit at this point that, although I have watched this film three times, I still don't know what it's about. I do not understand what these two screwballs are doing with these cameras and how it can possibly make them any money. All I know is that the next day, Sally is going to some charity costume party, and Alex thinks it's going to solve his and Nick's problems. Whatever their problems are.

Col Hampton and the Late Bronze Age play a horrible redneck-Zappa song at the costume party. Obviously, the host agrees, because she calls the guy who booked them and says:
"I guess the band you sent doesn't play jazz. They play shit."
Nick wears a ghost costume, which looks alot like a Klan outfit. Uncle Sam and George Washington do coke.

The DVD version of Getting In On! has a director's commentary track, and during all this bugfuck madness at the costume party, Olsen says, "I'd like to think we stayed one step ahead of the audience." Try three blocks, sir. Some plot-congealing does occur during the course of the evening, however, which helps to explain at least half of the story. And it's got tits, which is nice.

By the way, this film features some of the itty-bittiest boobs I think I've seen in a movie that is, after all, about topless chicks. As such, it should serve as some sort of cinematic nirvana for tiny-tits lovers. Regular sleaze-beasts, however, may be wondering where all the silicone has gone. Anyway, there's some final moments where everybody works their shit out, and then it's over. The credits list Amrita Bost as "Nude Girl With Flamethrower", but I did not see any nude girls with flamethrowers. If I did, I'm sure I would have remembered. I suppose it is possible that I blacked out somewhere during this film's excessive 96 minute running time, so if you spot her, please drop me a line. Thank you in advance.

In summation: Well, who knows? Filmed on a shoestring budget ($200,000) in a small North Carolina town, Getting It On! is a weird bit of southern-fried teensploitation that makes very little sense but ambles on good-naturedly enough. The videotape angle would seem sorta ominous if you could place the story and the characters in some sort of recognizable reality, but reality is out the window five minutes in, and it does not return. William Olsen returned to the teen-com well several times, following this one up with the equally incomprehensible but decent-enough Rockin' Road Trip (1985) and After School (1988). He also acted in the classic hicksploitation saga Hot Summer in Barefoot County (1974), so no matter what, the man deserves a round of applause. Most of the cast did this one on a goof and never acted again, although lead-girl Kennedy had a small part in Leprechaun (1993) and something called Raw Adventures at Bikini Point (1995), which sounds incredible. Getting In On! did pretty well, given it's paltry budget and non-actors, and still has a small-but-loyal cult following. The VHS release also had one of the greatest covers I have personally ever seen (the same image was also the theatrical poster), which made it a huge hit on the rental shelves.

Honestly, though....what nude girl with a flamethrower?

Availability: Getting It On! is available on DVD from VCI. Get it at Amazon.

Clip: Getting It On! Trailer:

-Ken McIntyre

My Tutor (1983)

Directed by George Bowers
Starring Caren Kaye, Matt Lattanzi, Crispin Glover, Clark Brandon
Rated R
USA
Shop for this poster!

"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
Shop for this poster!

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