By Richard Winters
My Rating: 2 out of 10
4-Word Review: Looking for some action.
Filmed on the island of St. Kitts in the West Indies the story, or what little there is of it, follows around a group o college men lead by Brad (Bronson Pinchot) and Chuck (Dan Schneider) who travel there in order to work at the resort and earn some money over the summer. They hope also to hit-on the bikini-clad babes in-between shifts and seem to have sex much more on their minds than work. The resort manager (David Lipman) hires disciplinarian Bill Martin (Samm-Art Williams) to get them under control, but even he has a hard time keeping them in-line. The boys also clash with a group of snotty ivy leaguers, who are on the island to film a soup commercial. After having several run-ins with them the boys challenge the Ivy guys to a rowboat race and become determined to beat them even if it means cheating.
This yet another low budget production produced by The Cannon Group, which was run by Yoram Globus and his cousin Menaham Golan. They made a business of buying bottom barrel scripts and turning them into low budget productions and while some of them where a delightful surprise and even rivaled a standard Hollywood production this was certainly not one of them. The script was co-written by Boaz Davidson, who had earlier success with the Israeli teen comedy Lemon Popsicle, which was later Americanized into The Last American Virgin that was also written and directed by him, but this one has none of the comic spark of those and seems compelled to reach to the lowest common denominator possible almost challenging the viewer to see how much inane, low brow humor they’re willing to sit through before turning it off.
Granted 80’s teen sex comedies where never meant to be masterpieces, but this thing, even when compared to those others, is incredibly uninspired and adds nothing new to the otherwise tired mix. The only two things that are a bit different from the norms of that genre is that the fat guy, played by Schneider, who later went on to star in the TV-show ‘Head of the Class’, isn’t shown constantly stuffing his face with food, or the butt of all the jokes. In fact he’s portrayed as being just as hip as the others and getting more action than the rest of them.
The film also switches things around in that it isn’t the men that are on the aggressive make, but instead the women, who literally grab the guys as they’re walking and minding their own business and then bring them into a room for hot action. At one point they even swipe an elderly man off the sidewalk though it’s hard to believe that any woman could be that oversexed. It might’ve made the story more funny and at least given it a certain logic by having the females take some sort of drug that causes them to become sexual animals, but that’s not the explanation here, which just makes the shenanigans all the more insane.
I started to wonder too if these gals were on the pill because if not they risked getting pregnant, which would force them to either get a lot of abortions, or raising kids they really didn’t want all by themselves since they didn’t even bother to get the names of the guys they had fucked, and seemed to choose them at random. Also, if you really think about it, it comes-off like rape as the men constantly say no and resist making it more like we’re witnessing a crime than just a carefree sex.
The guys who play Ivy Leaguers speak in such an overblown accent that it’s not even mildly amusing, but genuinely irritating and there’s simply no way that anyone who talked like that, no matter how deluded they were, would think they were cool and not worried that people would be making fun of them behind their backs. I will give some props though to the scene where the emergency medical personal must come to the aid of a couple who get stuck inside a car that they were making love in forcing the fire department to saw off the roof of the vehicle to get them out though anyone who would even think of trying to have sex in the back seat of a tiny VW bug should have their heads examined.
Some of the supporting players are amusing particularly Stephen Stucker, who plays the same type of character that he did in Airplane! where he’d jump into a scene say something quirky and then quickly jump back out. I also enjoyed Frank Gorshin (billed as Mr. Frank Gorshin) a talented impressionist who rose to fame playing the Riddler on the ‘Batman’ TV-show. Here he plays a dirty minded middle-aged man who tries to teach the youngsters the finer points of hitting-on chicks much to the consternation of his wife (Zora Rasmussen) who sits next to him and listens in as he talks about it. Mae Questal though, who’s best known for being the voice of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl gets sorely wasted particularly in the scene where she gets ‘tricked’ into putting on a dress with a giant bullseye on the back, which her husband plans to use as a target to aim his gun at, though it’s hard to imagine any woman wouldn’t have seen this before she put it on, which just shows how stupid and poorly thought out the gags are.
Even on the level of cheap, soft core porn it’s no good. The nudity is infrequent and fleeting and the women aren’t exactly cover girls looking more like they’re around 30 and a bit ‘rough-around-the-edges’, so if you’re looking to grab this thing simply for some healthy voyeurism you’ll still end up sorely disappointed anyways.
My Rating: 2 out of 10
Released: January 14, 1985
Runtime: 1 Hour 33 Minutes
Rated R
Director: John Robins
Studio: The Cannon Group
Available: VHS, DVD-R (dvdlady.com)
Scopophilia 