Dangerous Curves + Hunk

I am writing a birthday present to myself today, as opposed my Amityville Murders article which I wrote out of deference for Diane Franklin. That's not to say I didn't enjoy something special in her honor, what with the recent vogue for social distancing having reactivated my feelings about the bodacious brunette I've been championing as both an influence and friend for six years. I subscribed to Amazon Prime so that I could enjoy a rare 1990s appearance by Franklin, credited under her married name, in an episode of USA's short-lived spin-off of 1987's acclaimed The Big Easy.

"The End of the World" (s02e011) starred Diane Franklin De Laurentis as Zoey Simone, a psychic who can see not in the future but the present, whom lead detective Remy (Tony Crane) brings in to locate his kidnapped partner, played by Leslie Bibb. Turns out a young male bomber has a grudge to settle against N'awlins on behalf of his corrupted sister, and after Bibb's Janine corners the suspect in a uniform company, the hunter becomes a hostage.

There was a lot of silly dialogue involving pigs and ribs, and I can't help but think "incel" about the main antagonist. Yet I smiled upon seeing Diane Franklin in something that I missed back when I was a mere preteen. This would've been first aired around the time I discovered Monique Junet, and as someone who is deathlessly enamored with Diane even in her late 50s, she makes me feel so happy.

Ditto Kimberley Kates, for that matter, who I caught up with in a couple of seductress roles after she made her splash opposite Diane in Bill &Ted's Excellent Adventure. I think of her just as fondly as one of the most beautiful women I've ever had to great fortune to speak to. There was one movie in which Kimberley plays a tart trophy wife who lusts after Jared Leto's pool boy, Highway, and another in which she is a bordello belle who sweetly relieves Stephen Dorff of his virginity as he tracks down his main obsession, an abducted Ami Dolenz, the film called Rescue Me. “Happy birthday, Fraser.”

Coincidentally, Rescue Me was a Cannon Film, released a decade after Diane Franklin made her debut in the company's Last American Virgin and after the split between Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. It starred none other than Michael "American Ninja" Dudikoff in a central role opposite Dorff, so it could've conceivably been a relic from the 1980s dusted off for the early 1990s. Diane Franklin and Kimberley Kates both have given me so much love that I will never see them as the ingenues of their initial acting days, and I cannot give back enough gratitude to either for the pleasure. I adore them as adults, and turning 36 only replenishes the honey pot. I know they did something wonderful for me recently, but in trying to rebuild the fractured confidence that's been lying around, I need to rediscover some humility.

But I also need to stay true to my own intelligence as I try to respect those of these two women. So I have to tell myself again that when it comes to the genre of movies Diane and Kimberely will be remembered for, I have a kind of blind spot. You see, movies like Rescue Me or The Last American Virgin exist in a sort of vacuum for someone born in 1984. Before American Pie, I grew up thinking of teen comedies as programming filler for the very same USA Networks which aired that episode of The Big Easy with thirty-something wife/mother Diane Franklin De Laurentis.

I mentioned it in regards to Kimberley's Mosquito-Man, the fact that there was once an after-hours cable block called USA Up All Night that was like Cinemax with censors. And if you watched it religiously, it was like an orphanage for all the mercenary youth-oriented films that were so insanely prolific throughout the 1980s. There were Marilyn Chambers and Linnea Quigley vehicles also in circulation, to be true, but I will always associate USA with Rhonda Shear and Hardbodies and others of that ilk, many of which were objectively even worse. It also reminded me that though the teen comedy assembly line sped up in 1985 to an absurd degree, it was still functional up until the end of the decade, with brand names like Crown International and Vestron Pictures.

Which brings me to HUNK (PG, Crown International Pictures, 102 mins., theatrical release: Mar. 6, 1987) and DANGEROUS CURVES (PG, Lightning Pictures/Vestron Video, 93 mins., video release: Feb. 1, 1989), two late 1980s flicks which bore those very distributors on their wrappers. I had only the vaguest possible memory of the latter thanks to my uncle's VHS collection (it was on the same tape with John Hughes' The Breakfast Club, as aired on The Movie Channel, and I never did rewind that cassette to the beginning to watch Dangerous Curves), and the former was mentioned on a Patreon bonus episode of the now-defunct "'80s All Over" podcast by Eric D. Snider, who had written a piece on it prior. Dangerous Curves is one of those films I struggled to remember just minutes after finishing it, and Hunk already has Snide Remarks written all over it.

As someone who harbors little to no nostalgia for the midnight snacks of his childhood, and whom doesn't even love The Last American Virgin as much as Diane Franklin herself let alone the modern online critic circle, I am not the authoritative voice one wants for trashy ol' teen movies. I mourned the passing of Louisa “Carmela” Moritz, but I'll be damned if I say you should watch Hot Chili just so you could remember her by that (the same applies for Joe Rubbo once he passes). Walter Chaw admitted to wearing out a VHS copy of My Chauffeur out of youthful infatuation, but Deborah Foreman couldn't save that flick for me, at all. There are even people who found Diane Franklin suitable masturbation material based off The Last American Virgin, which only makes me question its fan base and even Diane herself (who has repeatedly used the phrase “sex education” in her remembrances) harsher.

Not every teen movie needs to be Gregory's Girl, I understand, but I do have some prevailing standards. And if I hadn't made it clear from the start, I love the players even as I loathe the game. Hunk, for instance, actually has a very good lead performance from John Allen Nelson as the titular panty-melter, and unlike Eric D. Snider, I will give Nelson credit also for helping to burn Killer Klowns from Outer Space into my memory cells (he was Officer Dave, the third in the triangle between Grant Cramer's Mike and Suzanne Snyder's Debbie). Between both Hunk and Dangerous Curves, I also have to mention several luminaries, be they Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Avery Schreiber, and James Coco.

But I have to speak frankly about Dangerous Curves, which is as formulaic a teen comedy as a committee has ever conceived. It's a vessel for PG-rated cheesecake, undistinguished turns from overqualified actors (even Martha Quinn is too good for this) and as many then-contemporary teen film clichés one could cram into a 90-minute run time. A mismatched pair of collegiates, one studious, the other hedonistic, both bumbling clods? Check. Road trip to meet up with a girl? Check. Cherry red Porsche and Ferrari automobiles begging to be hijacked? The former car applies to the latter box, so this check was already cashed. Parade of swimsuit-clad babes? The movie is called Dangerous Curves, after all!

There are other easy boxes to tick off, but you can connect the dots already and deduce the film's plot all too easily. The studious boy, Chuck (Tate Donovan), is entrusted with driving a Porsche down to Lake Tahoe to ensure a prosperous career at Faciano Industries. CEO Louis Faciano (Robert Stack), friend of Chuck's dad from their 'Nam days, threatens Chuck with bodily harm if his daughter doesn't get her birthday convertible on time. Chuck's horndog buddy Wally (Grant Heslov), aka Mookie, aka Homey Boy, tags along as a necessary evil. One parking ticket at a Circle K later, Chuck loses the Porsche only to find it is the grand prize in a beauty pageant. Chuck and Wally scheme to retrieve it while mingling with the sexy talent, the awkward Chuck falling particularly for a supposed tomboy named Michelle (Danielle von Zerneck). Allies include a beach bum named Bam Bam (Robert Klein) and a depressive cabbie named Hector (Robert Romanus); foes include the sailing extortionist who seized the Porsche, Krevske (Leslie Nielsen) and the dotty pageant manager herself, Miss Reed (Elizabeth Ashley).

With a title like Dangerous Curves, I expected something sexier and livelier than the non-entity I had to watch. I was hoping to come across a Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry for the crowd who only want their License to Drive. No go. Everything that happens here is slavishly beholden to the instruction manual, yet the cake that has somehow baked itself deflates upon contact with the fork.

This is One Crazy Summer without Savage Steve Holland (or anybody who could cut a single one of its cast), Spring Break without Sean S. Cunningham (faint praise, indeed) and Risky Business after it has been dismantled beyond recognition by auto pirates. It makes no demands of Tate Donovan, fresh off SpaceCamp and rehearsing his later nerd role in Love Potion #9, or Danielle von Zerneck, fresh off La Bamba and soon to end her sadly nondescript acting career on a high note with 1995's Living in Oblivion. It casts Grant Heslov, soon to be George Clooney's partner in production, as the promising Curtis Armstrong/Fisher Stevens sidekick and strands him on the surf without a board. And as for the storied Mike Damone, the legendary host of Unsolved Mysteries, the king of Second City cut-ups, and the once and future Lt. Frank Drebin? Just keep adding up those checks, because the laughs are strictly on the one hand.

The only interesting thing I can say about Dangerous Curves, directed with sunshiny vacuousness by full-time cinematographer David Lewis and written by a trio of TV hacks, is that Valerie Breiman (She's Having a Baby, Casual Sex?), who plays Michelle's best friend Blake, got the inspiration to write and direct her own low-grade resort comedy immediately after this. That film was Going Overboard, which you may know marked the screen debut of some mensch by the name of Adam Sandface. I forget his real last name, I'm sorry. Didn't he make a movie recently about selling jewels? That was one of the best of 2019, I can attest to that. Shame that I can't place him beyond the first syllable.

Thank heavens for Hunk, a real American hero and not just in the Bud Light sense. Dangerous Curves reinforced my prejudices against the teen sex comedy as being as tasteful as used bubblegum and as beneficial as shooting guns in the air to kill off the Coronavirus. I may not have toilet paper at this time (those Charmin ads breaking up the viewing process are taunting me), but Hunk was as much a relief. Here is a bad movie with personality, as well as dialogue, satire, sentimentality, and many other things Dangerous Curves didn't have. Granted, the star power isn't as electric and the camera is shier in approaching too many strategically-covered nubile bodies (both these movies are tame as hell compared to the ones I've mentioned with Princesses Diane and Kimberley). Hunk is in the gutter but laughing at the weirdly-shaped clouds, which is a true sign of unforced amiability.

Hidden somewhere in the sculpted physique of John Allen Nelson is the mind of that sexy body's previous owner, Bradley Brinkman (Steve Levitt). The movie begins with Hunk (that's his actual name, Hunk Golden) cruising to a short-notice psychiatrist appointment and confessing to one Dr. Susan “Sunny” Graves (Rebeccah Bush) that he no longer wants to be The Stud, and that “time is running out” for poor Bradley and himself. The fantastical story of Bradley/Hunk is Faust updated for the Big Eighties, as a wimpy computer programmer makes the mistake of offering his soul for success and stature. First, Bradley is a victim of that old Weird Science, as his PC prints out a manifesto called "The Yuppie Program" that saves his job with Mr. Constantopolis (Avery Schreiber). He then blows his bonus on a rundown beach house in the resort community of Sea Spray, populated by the Beautiful People he wishes to become one of, as he brainstorms a follow-up to his supernatural runaway success.

Too hopeless for Charles Atlas to reform, Bradley finally meets at his dud of an open house party the literal dream woman who's been making the scene, O'Brien (Deborah Shelton). She is the emissary of Dr. D (James Coco), and has come to complete the transformation by offering Bradley a trial period, up until midnight after Labor Day, of an irresistible alter ego. The nebbish signs his contract via hypodermic pen and wakes up the next morning as Hunk Golden, complete with new accessories and a fortune to burn. After getting his own back against the volleyball-playing snobs who humiliated him while he was Bradley, Hunk is ready for the spoils of social victory, from a 24-hour metabolism to trend-setting fashion choices and, of course, a sex drive ample enough to plow through the entire female populace of Sea Spray in a matter of weeks.

After conquering a sexy woman in a mermaid costume (Andrea Patrick), Hunk gets a rude awakening courtesy of Dr. D himself. If he doesn't want to revert back to Bradley's body, Hunk will have to agree to be the Devil's latest agent of chaos upon death and murder the entire community of Sea Spray on the way to starting the third world war. From this point on, the film plays out in linear time as Hunk and Sunny become out-of-office romantic interests. Hunk also becomes a media sensation after saving her life, although because he's still Bradley, he starts to regret and rebel against the spotlight further. It all culminates with a key to the city ceremony approaching that dreaded deadline, although it is certain that Hunk is a decent enough man to save his soul. But what will become of Sunny?

What gives Lawrence Bassoff's movie an edge over Dangerous Curves is the casting of both Bradley and Hunk. Steve Levitt has a junior Gene Wilder's visage and plays the dorky role refreshingly straight against the hyper-campy competition. The real surprise, however, is John Allen Nelson, who suggests Bruce Davison as a tanned and toned surfer dude. Here is a performer who has a little more to offer than the arch pretty boys and hangdog wisenheimers of your average teen flick, and Nelson projects a natural charisma and innate humor which never lets you forget that Bradley still exists. A dream sequence in which Bradley escapes from hell to reunite with his mortal body keeps the fantasy credible. Bassoff (Weekend Pass) is also more ambitious with his screenplay in terms of humor; references to Letterman, Geraldo Rivera and Chuck Norris are tossed off with aplomb if not consistent levels of laughter, and Nelson isn't too hunky that he can't deliver a prize line of dialogue or three:

"Sea Spray by night means the Sand Castle [bar]. The men are low on body fat. The women are high on themselves...and whatever else is going around."

"I finally meet a beautiful woman and she wants me to bomb Pearl Harbor. Talk about romantic."

"You know you've made it when your garbage is front-page news."

Game as he is, Nelson isn't allowed to upstage James Coco, who is clearly having a ball with his various mephistophelian guises in a posthumous performance (he died shortly before the film's release in March of 1987). Deborah Shelton is passable in her first role since Body Double, mainly because of the comic opportunities afforded her. Supporting performances by the actors playing the bullies and freaks of Sea Spray (i.e. Cynthia Szigeti as local busybody Chachka) are enthusiastic if not terribly memorable. The only role which I felt didn't work completely is the broad portrayal by Robert Morse of a Robin Leach caricature, a gratuitous flash of homophobia so brazen that he's actually named Gaylord.

Much like My Chauffeur, which was another Crown-brand exploitation comedy with a lead performer who deserved better (Deborah "Valley Girl" Foreman, herself), Hunk is at once engagingly high-spirited and regrettably lowbrow. Whereas David Beaird undercut the old-fashioned screwball airs of My Chauffeur with pointlessly vulgar elements, Lawrence Bassoff compromises the integrity of his own fairy tale with misjudged broad strokes. When Hunk gets down with a former candy stripe nurse named Laurel Springs (Melanie Vincz), the result isn't as titillating or as funny as it could be, a common predicament of vintage teen sex comedies. The PG rating is admirable at first because it suggests tactfulness, but the movie's limp swipes at yuppie idiosyncrasies are kid gloves poking your ribs. And your own personal tolerance for corn will ultimately determine whether you accept the time-honored morals this film reheats; unlike The Sure Thing, the journey isn't so unexpectedly charming to make up for the destination.

But there I go again, comparing wheat to chaff. Movies like Dangerous Curves and Hunk are not built for fawning retrospectives by discriminating film fans; they were meant for articles as small as the screens they eventually got the most saturation from. Letterboxd has proven that everyone's a critic nowadays, and again it reminds me just how frustrating it can be to devote your attention, serious or not, to what is essentially marshmallow spread. If I am lucky, a movie like Hunk at least has an endearing performance from an inexperienced actor and some genuine mirth; if not, I get movies like Dangerous Curves, which aren't worth an iota of your nostalgia even with so much proven talent. But just like in real life, you have to count your blessings, and at least you didn't have to read about my opinions of that truly horrible Adam Sandler movie from 1989.

Dear God, if anyone were responsible for killing off '80s nostalgia for me, it would be Shecky Moskowitz. At least Diane Franklin and Kimberley Kates will outlast all my worst memories of life and cinema.

The Hollywood Knights

THE HOLLYWOOD KNIGHTS
(R, Columbia Pictures, 91 mins., theatrical release date: May 16, 1980)

As long as there are cars and girls to be romanticized, there will always be a place for filmmakers to wax nostalgic about their high school nights spent cruising the metropolitan strip looking for action and adventure. The benchmark example remains George Lucas' American Graffiti, which was both entertaining and expressionistic in following four Modesto seniors' last tastes of adolescent freedom. We will need sewers, too, which is appropriate in the case of THE HOLLYWOOD KNIGHTS. 

Having built enough of a fan base among after-hours HBO aficionados and suckers for low-hanging slapstick, Columbia/Tri-Star overcame music licensing issues for The Hollywood Knights' initial DVD release in 2000. That Universal Studios managed to put Bob Zemeckis' I Wanna Hold Your Hand on plastic four years after seems a grave injustice.

Writer/director Floyd Mutrux pleads naiveté several times in the audio commentary track (exclusive to the DVD, not on the Blu-Ray release) when he shares ideas that are blatant cribs from American Graffiti and its ilk, from the disc jockey-as-Greek chorus device to the peeping tomfoolery of horn dogs from on high to the sobering depiction of society's fall from grace after the 1950s. But what Mutrux hasn't done with The Hollywood Knights is allow it Lucas' sense of levity, nor turned the period setting into a kitschy cartoon a la Grease, nor went for John Landis' droll burlesque which made Animal House its own trendsetter.

Instead, The Hollywood Knights, cult following be damned, is exactly what it is to the naked eye: the inbred bastard offspring of all three established blockbusters. And in 1980, too, where comedy fans could look forward to Airplane! and Used Cars and The Blues Brothers and Caddyshack and Stir Crazy and 9 to 5 and Private Benjamin. In what stunted brain does The Hollywood Knights share a pedestal with these films, let alone its exalted forebears?

Aping George Lucas' patchwork plotting but adding the kind of gratuitous vulgarity which made it more pliant to the easily amused, Mutrux comes nowhere near close to capturing the spirit of ‘65. He clearly wishes he it were ‘56 instead. The three years of history that existed between Lucas and Mutrux's respective settings doesn't exist, and the soundtrack doesn't even scratch the surface of what I'd imagine listening to the radio in 1965 would be. For one, the only hit song of that year heard in The Hollywood Knights is "Wooly Bully," which was the Year-End #1 song of 1965 and also heard in More American Graffiti. Except for a couple nods to The Supremes, there's little of the Motown sound. No British Invasion at all, no Dylan or McGuire, no Tom Jones, no Righteous Brothers, not even the deathless likes of "I Got You Babe," "I Got You (I Feel Good), "(What a) Wonderful World," "Hang on Sloopy," or even "The Name Game."

He does use "Little Darling" by The Diamonds, in the exact same way American Graffiti did. Maybe Mutrux should've set it in 1964 given that "Baby Love," "Rag Doll," "Goin' Out of My Head," and an a cappella rendition of "Under the Boardwalk" represent the lion's share of a single year's chartbusters. The point is that Mutrux could care less about the ostensible year this takes place in, and that I might be stalling from having to describe the many other ways this movie bombs.

The gist of the movie is that the title posse are into cars and girls, which means that the news of their beloved hangout, a drive-in diner named Tubby's, being closed the day after Halloween at the behest of the Beverly Hills Residents Association will not do. Mutrux doesn't even do thing one with the possibilities of October 31. Where are the costume parties, trick-or-treaters, jack o'-lanterns, fucking anything to make me believe in Halloween?!

Anyway, Tubby's is set to be torn down by the richies, so The Hollywood Knights, a completely anonymous bunch led by the wannabe mythical Newbomb Turk, decide to pull a few pranks at various societal gatherings in between pit stops at their beloved diner and other negligible run-ins with ladies, lawmen and lame-os. Because none of these jokers has any conceivable personality, their appeal lives and dies with their front man. As played by Robert Wuhl in his first movie, Newbomb Turk is as boring as he is boorish. You'd never guess he would be ready for prime time someday (cf: Arli$$) based on Mutrux's film, where Wuhl is the very poor man's John Belushi (lesser than John DiSanti from 1979's King Frat) crossed with an equally broke schmuck's Bill Murray (he's not even Steve Guttenberg).

Turk's most inspired act of sabotage is to kidnap an obese nerd (Stuart Pankin) and, in the place of the scheduled magic act during a pep rally, scream and fart a rendition of "Volare." And Wuhl's not even the least bit funny doing that. It's as if he‘s trying too hard at something Belushi could cruise with. Not that Mutrux writes anything for Wuhl on the level of "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!" The sophomoric comedy is mostly visual, and Mutrux bungles every one of them, including several gags that would thrive in the late 1990s under better directors. Mutrux even rips off National Lampoon magazine's own high school satire during the aforementioned rally. And Turk's other fast ones involve the oldest of standbys, from flaming dog doo to peeing in the punch to ogling/spying on numerous girls to what we will call Chekhov's Pie Wagon.

"But wait, Johnny! What about Tony Danza and Michelle Pfeiffer, who are clearly the stars of this movie based on the DVD cover art?"

I'd pity whoever would say that, because neither of them are in the film for even a quarter of the time as Robert Wuhl is. They do appear onscreen together in a pitiful clone of the Ronny Howard/Cindy Williams subplot from American Graffiti, in which Danza's Duke chafes at Pfeiffer's Suzie Q wanting to escape the boring life of a car hop for a shot at acting. It's as obligatory as their names, as is another Knight's plight (Gary Graham's Jimmy) concerning his one-way ticket to Vietnam. Given how Pfeiffer was Mutrux's choice of leading lady when he was in talks to direct Urban Cowboy, it's astonishing how little she has to do with the movie.

Fran Drescher makes more of an impression than Pfeiffer, but this is the same year she starred in Gorp. So her main function is to prattle away with her two girlfriends while they undress in the unwanted company of the Knights. Although the two attempt to get it on later in the flick, it was never clear if Drescher's Sally is Turk's squeeze. Anyway, the future Bobbi Flekman is just as squandered here as Pfeiffer is.

Am I missing something? Well, Gailard Sartain and Sandy Helberg (another one who went on to Spinal Tap? And Joyce Hyser is in this, too?!) are incompetent patrolmen who incur the wrath of the Hollywood Knights by towing the car belonging to Turk's brother. Leigh French and Richard Schaal are two of the evil hoi polloi who can't keep from engaging in illicit sex in broad nighttime. Did I mention that the Knights are like the T-Birds crossed with the Delta Tau Chi fraternity except I can't remember a single one besides the three who are the most prominently hackneyed?

The Hollywood Knights is non-stop raunchy exploitation too cluttered and clumsy to enjoy on a basic level. It can't even climax with a convincing bang like Animal House given how tasteless it is even looking past the puerile humor, because it is such an unabashed rip-off of American Graffiti. Funny that Columbia Pictures were one of the many big studios who spurned George Lucas on his way to the top, only to greenlight this travesty. "And here I sit, sucking on brown Popsicles."

Private School

PRIVATE SCHOOL
(R, Universal Pictures, 89 mins., theatrical release date: July 29, 1983)

In my review of Mischief, a passing reference was made to a movie called Private School. For some godforsaken reason, I chose to revisit it in the hopes that I didn't have to use a two-word review that could sum up whatever appeal the movie had, which in '80s teen sex comedies tend to be as flimsy as the women's garments. And now I feel safe in dispatching this one with my original blunt, no-frills description:

Privates, Cool!

Thanks for your time, I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip the concierge and happy trails.

Maybe Mischief really was a passion project for Noel Black, because nothing in Privates, Cool...I'm sorry, Private School indicates a genuine filmmaking effort from all involved. Based on what I read in old newspaper clippings, this isn't even Noel Black's baby at all. Instead, you can place/blame whatever auteur tendencies are to be gleaned on the producer, Tel Aviv-born R. Ben Efraim. After making a mint on Private Lessons, this one-man Golan-Globus wannabe reportedly market-researched the hell out of his follow-up, going so far as to cater to "live teenage audiences" directly. To quote Universal Pictures' press kit, as relayed by Skip Sheffield of the Boca Raton News, Efraim deployed "the most sophisticated principles of testing and evaluation in all phases of production."

Yeah, right. Fancy terms for condescension aren't endearing to me even if I want nothing more than a 50-minute sizzle reel of T&A padded out for box-office legitimacy. Hardbodies had more of a sense of humor in its advertising blitz than this, not to mention better dialogue and direction.

For all I know, the motherfucker who produced Mitchell may as well have been influenced by his fellow Israelis when Lemon Popsicle was breaking big in Hebrew Land, which of course led to The Last American Virgin. Private School is a retread of that low landmark rather than the Sylvia Kristel-is-My Tutor antics of Efraim's previous smash, only without the clinical attention paid to the act of intercourse, not to mention the subsequent abortion and betrayal. Efraim apparently willed into being a transparent ogling party, and based on the high volume of female flesh on show, I doubt he reached out to adolescent girls one whit.

All you need to know about Efraim's legitimacy can be summed up by his three most outstanding credits which followed: Private Resort, Private Lessons 2, Private Lessons: Another Story. I'm sure a scientific cross-section of Skinemax viewers helped him fulfill that potential.

The only thing Privates...Private School has going for it is song which heralds the opening credits, Harry Nilsson's "You're Breaking My Heart." Ten years prior, the rakish iconoclast who popularized such couplets as "Everybody's talkin' at me/I don't hear a word they're sayin,'" "I can't live/If living is without you" and "You put de lime in de coconut/You drank 'em bot' up" reacted to romantic disappointment in a decidedly profane yet pithy act of subversion, with George Harrison's slide guitar egging him on. Such a gloriously rude anthem makes an ideal choice to kick off some Animal House-worthy antics, but Private School never proves as inspired as that one solitary musical cue.

(Rick Springfield, The Stray Cats, Bow Wow Wow, Trio, and Vanity 6 are the other name attractions on the soundtrack, with Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs' "Li'l Red Riding Hood" the sole oldie.)

Instead, we get a trite series of conflicts between boys and girls, young and old, all of them tedious louts. The female students of Cherryvale Academy defy their repressed headmistress, get peeped at by the male students of Freemount Academy and everyone unites for a PTA pool party where a limousine loudspeaker broadcasts some salacious distraction. Alleged scribes Dan Greenburg & Suzanne O'Malley rehash way too many exhausted clichés under the pompous notion of "fun" (the one hurdle these prurient '80s teen romps constantly trip over). The imbecilic anarchy unwittingly becomes its own form of fascism.

There's a sex education class presided over by a listless Sylvia Kristel, whose juvenile name is the only designation of any laughter, not that it delivers. There's Ray Walston making a fool of himself in ways Amy Heckerling deigned not to do. There's the unbilled Martin Mull as a jabbering drugstore clerk who complicates a routine over-the-counter request for condoms (they were available on the shelves in the early '80s, for Christ's sake!). There's lanky Matthew Modine as Jim in love with Phoebe Cates' Christine, plotting out a romantic weekend of virginal conjugation (Cates gets to play innocent and sing, but her presence is just another bust). And, of course, there's Betsy Russell as Jordan, the class exhibitionist out to wreck things for the happy couple when she's not being pestered by Jim's buddy, Bubba (Michael Zorek), who appears to be hitting it off nicely with Christine's rebellious friend Betsy (Kathleen Wilhoite) whenever he's not sating his excruciating voyeurism.

Yes, the spank-tacular sight of Betsy Russell on horseback with her blouse open is meant to be an act of sabotage, an attempt to lure Jim all for herself with those teacup nipples. But what to make of a scene later when Jordan corners loverboy himself after he turns up as part of a drag-dressing stunt with Bubba and dork Roy (Jonathan Prince)? Vamping and undressing and raising the thermostat to drive him crazy, you'd think she'd make the most of what would appear to be having Jim delivered on a silver platter. Nah, it never gets amusingly bitchy or erotic, just leery and lame. Jordan's a dim bimbo in such a constant state of undress that when she's supposed to be truly humiliated, it never registers.

Good for sales of Vaseline, though!

Porky's and Mischief sure look like perfect 10s compared to the mindless, endless, useless peek-a-boo of Privates, Cool. Flunk this shit.

Porky's

Young man rhythm got a hold on me, too. I got the writin' pneumonia and a bad case of the flu.

Watching Less Than Zero only made me feel groggier, so maybe it's time I aimed in a different direction. How about the sleeper hit of 1982, the definitive guy's movie and the most dubious trendsetter of early 1980s cinema? The film forever associated with locker room peeping, industrial-size rubbers and prank calls to Michael Hunt. The one and only, for better or for worse, it's either this or NyQuil...

PORKY'S
(R, 20th Century Fox, 94 mins., theatrical release date: March 19, 1982)

You know, Bob Clark used to have a pretty impressive resume, just like Dino De Laurentiis. I believe this on the strength of the horror movies he started out with in the early 1970s. Flanked regularly by screenwriter Alan Ormsby, Clark started out with the amateurish but promising Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, but the two really came into their stride in 1974, when they blitzed the screens with some highly influential, historically-revered shockers. Before audiences were introduced to Leatherface and his Texas chainsaw, Ormsby and Clark put to screen the grisly true crimes of Ed Gein in Deranged, and also did their previous Romero homage one better with the haunting ghost story/family drama Deathdream (Dead of Night). Those two movies also introduced someone named Tom Savini to the world, perhaps you've heard of him.

And then there was Black Christmas, which shares with Tobe Hooper's classic a preface to the coming ubiquity of the "slasher" film. This formula would be solidified and monetized by the popularity of Halloween and Friday the 13th, so I must give Bob Clark the credit he's due despite whatever opinions I or others may have said. He was an originator, a maker of great independent spook shows and deserved better than to go out on something like those Baby Geniuses stinkers.

And did you know he directed Jack Lemmon to an Oscar-nominated performance in Tribute?

But Clark's ultimate legacy in popular culture might not be A Christmas Story, but a project he allegedly spent 15 years fielding material for, drawing upon his own memories as those of his peers. Yes, we're talking about Porky's now. I was just spermatozoa when this film was spending eight weeks atop the U.S. box office and raking in hundreds of millions from North American audiences. It was the biggest success story in Canadian cinematic history until 2006, when the bilingual Bon Cop, Bad Cop and a Resident Evil sequel(?) usurped it.

To the dismay of Siskel & Ebert (and perhaps myself, to be honest), Porky's made enough bank to ensure an endless series of sniggering, superficial rites-of-passage flicks that are nowhere near the greatness of Animal House and more in league with such desperately raunchy fare as Gorp or The Hollywood Knights. Hell, Porky's wasn't even the first of its breed. You had nostalgia-fueled totems of adolescent irresponsibility as early as Summer of ‘42 and American Graffiti, and there was also Lemon Popsicle. Perhaps it was the audiences getting burnt out on the bastard sons of Friday the 13th that ensured Porky's outrageous success and stream of imitators, a few such as Risky Business and Revenge of the Nerds offering more than the same smug sex jokes. It is a sociological curiosity if not the over-hyped cause célèbre time would convince you.

But I'm not trying to write a term paper, I only want a satisfying film review. So here I am, sneezing my way through every paragraph, to give my take on Porky's. Let's sty one on.

In the great tradition of these "autobiographical" blackout sketch movies, there's not much I can say about the plot as a set-up. The setting is Angel Beach High School in Florida's Seward County, 1954. I assume Bob Clark was simply trying to reach the spot between between Robert Mulligan's 1942 and George Lucas' 1962, but he was 15 years old at the actual time this movie sticks its flag in. The central character is Edward Morris, affectionately/mockingly nicknamed "Pee Wee" (Dan Monahan), and he stupidly strains his member trying to hide his morning wood from his mother on this average school day. No wonder he gets further bent when he busts out the ruler to measure his "progress."

Among his circle of bros, Pee Wee is the most neurotic with his libido. He can't even think right when he's flaccid, let alone hard. This leads to him being gullible on a level that ought to demote him to the level of nerd, only he doesn't have the horn-rims. Recently, he's won the ridicule of Wendy the waitress (Kaki Hunter) for deigning to wear a condom before trying to score. He inadvertently eggs the campus behemoth, Anthony "Meat" Tuperello (Tony Ganios). And he outright hectors the hotshot alphas, Tommy Turner (Wyatt Knight) and Billy McCarty (Mark Herrier), into taking him along on a field trip to the shack of redhead prostitute Cherry Forever (Susan Clark). Naturally, it turns out to be too easy to be true.

Where there's a will, there's a way, so for Pee Wee and pals the path to sexual salvation compels them to Porky's, the fabled redneck dive further out in the Everglades. This time, the joke's on all of them, as Porky Wallace (Chuck Mitchell, four years before berating Lane Meyer) fails to deliver on the action, dumps them out in the swamp water and extorts the rest of their cash with the help of his brother, also the local sheriff (Alex Karras). This development doesn't sit well with Mickey Jarvis (Roger Wilson, previously seen on this site in Second Time Lucky), who alternates between driving back out for revenge and returning home with nastier signs of bodily harm.

The whole of Porky's is as erratic as the synopsis so far, shifting from convivial smut to not-quite-redeeming social value. The Angel Beach Boys finally work out a suitable comeuppance for the Wallaces, but that's saved until the very end. Outside of the blue ha-ha set pieces, there's a subplot for the boys' 23-year-old basketball coach, Roy Brackett (Boyd Gaines) and his pursuit of the luscious Miss Honeywell (Kim Cattrall), whom his mentor Mr. Goodenough (Bill Hindman) refers to as "Lassie," which confuses Brackett until he gets her alone in the laundry room. Also, there's lightweight friction between flagrant bigot Tim Cavanaugh (Cyril O'Reilly) and the Semitic Brian Schwartz (Scott Colomby), who can defend himself verbally and physically.

And then there's Coach Balbricker (Nancy Parsons), the corpulent laughingstock of both the student body and faculty. In a movie where the male leads provide their own laugh track in every scene, Parsons at least gets some deserving chuckles through her nonplussed reactions to their shenanigans. Alas, her prudish devotion to "moral turpitude" descends into psychotic mania, and the broader the character becomes, the nastier Clark treats her, and the more I want to see Parsons as the devious Ida Vincent in Motel Hell.

I want to like Porky's, I really do. The same way that I do Animal House or Slap Shot or Stripes or even Hardbodies! I crave vicarious belly laughs that thumb their nose at authority and explore the multiple ways attempted conquests can go farcically sour. Sometimes going through the "innocent" antics of past generations can be entertaining, hilarious, even insightful. I mean, American Graffiti is a gold standard for lots of reasons. And The 40-Year-Old Virgin, forget about it!

Porky's is also more of an equal-opportunity offender, take that as you will, than the shit it spawned. Yes, there is a lot of ooh-gling and ahh-gling, but at least in the case of Wendy and Honeywell, the girls can give as much as they take. The Angel Beach community feels like a community, where incompatible personalities can unite in some sense of pride (getting one over on Porky) or shame (the generational racism of Cavanaugh). And as the series went on, even Balbricker was humanized somewhat, although she doesn't escape the automatic instinct to mock the obese you find in politically-incorrect sops to the plebeian moviegoers.

It's just that the movie operates on this common tendency among raunchy comedies at the time to filter bygone eras through distinctly modern, unrepentantly vulgar eyes. When it works, you get Animal House, but they can also go way, waaayyyy too far, just look at the Lemon Popsicle series. Bob Clark wants to have his beaver hunt and shoot the ones in the barrel, too. That's how you get such thorny showstoppers as the peephole scene, where the boys reveal their outright hostility to the naked girls on show, who seem to take the voyeurism a little too in stride. It's also where you glean similarly unenlightened attitudes toward blacks and Jews, which at least pays dividends in the performance of Scott Colomby as the ostracized Schwartz, which is more natural than any of the other boys (honorable mention to Boyd Gaines from Fame and The Sure Thing).

Furthermore, the Porky's series as I recall is more about schadenfreude than the joys or dangers of sex. This prevents it from trying to develop a lot of unconvincing sincerity, which I guess beats the alternative as presented by the Lemon Popsicle franchise, but it's still conservative in its own way. By the end, Pee Wee is rewarded with sex after all his mania (again with Wendy, natch), but it's during the end credits and he's the only of the goon squad (read: I don't count Coach Brackett, even if he is one of the boys at heart) to actually make it. There's more fighting than fucking, which I guess says something abut the male ego. And except for a few token exceptions (Pee Wee, Meat, Wendy), the characters are interchangeable and acting is on a strictly sitcom level, right down to the overage actors feigning teenage attitudes (Grease, anyone?). Even Film Freak Central got it wrong when Travis Hoover mistook Mickey for Cavanaugh.

And on the basic level, Porky's is a hangout movie about schmoes who let it all hang out. You'd think something like this would be entertaining in an insinuating, loose manner, but sometimes Bob Clark shows a tendency to let moments stretch out to the point where the humor starts to get less of a reaction. The Honeywell scene drags on...and on...and even with Kim Cattrall baying in heat, Clark could've used a proper editor. It doesn't build to anything unexpected, it's just the joke about why they call her "Lassie." And for a lot of people, apparently that's enough. But it's just not good comedy.

Do I feel Porky's got extremely overrated? Yes, I do. But did I actually cave in and laugh at times? Well...like I said, Nancy Parsons is better at reactive giggles than others, and much of Dan Monahan's overbearing eagerness ("Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!" after he strips buck naked) delivers the titters. And Susan Clark as Cherry Forever, sizing up the studs in a single file line, she's amusingly salty. And if you had a prophylactic fit for King Kong (although Balbricker is nicknamed "Kong" constantly, another sour running joke), you'd blow it up and start ramming into every foxy lady's groin in sight for the amusement of your friends. It's not entirely an arid desert of comedy, if only because the enthusiasm of getting away with improper behavior is a reliable fantasy.

But to deny the film has problems is to admit to wearing blinders on your eyes. Having engaged in social media, I find myself inundated with a bevy of nostalgia for a period piece set in an era its audience would have little knowledge about. It's not like in 1981 we pined for Patti Page, Hank Williams and The Crew Cuts on our jukeboxes, right? (Well, as the Eighties continued, it certainly felt like a brazen attempt to recapture the Fifties) In the blaze of wisenheimer quips, innuendos and expletives, there are bound to be groaners, from the joke about angel food cake to the dopey deputies of the finale.

Bob Clark would remain proud of Porky's until his untimely death, getting his say in on a special edition DVD release, and its mammoth success remains undeniable. But in 2016, I can't help but feel that this will never turn up on a list of my all-time favorite comedies, eliciting nothing more than a shrug and minor confession of what did strike me as funny. Hardly proportionate to its status as the fifth most lucrative release of 1982 (luckily, Tootsie bested it as the year's blockbuster comedy). Sometimes, bad jokes are simply bad jokes, no matter how loud the canned laughter is. And though I think I prefer Porky's to much of its suckling spawn, that same year brought us Diner, which rings of greater truth and camaraderie. Porky's was a smash, but even though the reasons for it are obvious, I wouldn't want to wallow in that thought for too long.

Cannon Fodder: Mata Hari (1985)

MATA HARI
(R, Cannon Films, 108 mins., theatrical release date: September 1985)

"Bolero 2: Emmanuelle 4.5." That is my pet name for Mata Hari.

The last time I reviewed a shameless softcore period piece starring an over-the-hill sex symbol, I felt like giving up on The Cannon Group entirely. There's only so much idiocy and bad judgment one can take from Golan & Globus before you rue the day you decided to investigate their track record for yourself. And the next time I revisit Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, I'm going to wince from the experiences of watching Bolero, The Apple and now Mata Hari uncontrollably.

With Bo Derek no longer interested in keeping ties with Cannon, the tacky twosome turned to her Dutch doppelganger, Sylvia Kristel, to satiate their opportunism. In the wake of 1981's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which reunited her with the director who stripped her to fame back in 1974...well, that D.H. Lawrence adaptation didn't get released in America until May 1982. Preceding Lady Chatterley's Lover theatrically was Kristel's appearance in the movie which kicked down the doors for glut of teenage sex movies to come, Private Lessons.

The multilingual model with the 164 I.Q. went Hollywood as the duplicitous French servant who romances/titillates a 15-year-old rich boy. Private Lessons was a sleeper hit even with Kristel being body-doubled, thus the European embodiment of adult-minded erotica became another oversexed pawn in a more disreputable liaison. Kristel's popularity encouraged Louisa Moritz, Joan Collins and Jacqueline Bisset to also act out variations on this cougar cliché. By the time a real movie of quality, Risky Business, arrived to put its predecessors to shame, Kristel came full circle with a "special appearance" as a sex education teacher in Private School.

As I mentioned previously, Cannon thought about making a follow-up to The Last American Virgin which would've had Kristel getting conquered by the three boors. It never happened, mainly because I would imagine the idea of Lawrence Monoson finding solace in Sylvia Kristel's bosom would've been a straight-up copy of Private Lessons. And we already had that with My Tutor and They're Playing with Fire, the latter starring Eric "Philly" Brown himself opposite Cannon regular Sybil Danning.

Instead, in 1985, Hot Chili became Virgin's unofficial sequel by virtue of having Joe Rubbo and Louisa Mortiz star in it (as well as plagiarism from all of the previous Lemon Popsicle movies). Sylvia Kristel, meanwhile, found herself in a more typical refuge for aging if bankable screen sirens working under Golan-Globus: The Out-of-Costume Drama.

The legend of Mata Hari, the sensual entertainer who was tried and executed for enemy espionage during WWI, became the basis for Kristel's second Cannon vehicle. Whereas Bolero invoked and sullied the prestige of silent film star Rudolph Valentino, Mata Hari makes hash of a role which was previously handled by Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich (see Dishonored) and Jeanne Moreau. Poor Kristel may look beautiful in the buff, director Curtis Harrington pitching in a handful of titillating diversions from the mind games surrounding Lady MacLeod. But she cannot command the screen in any other manner besides undressed, and this '70s sex kitten is reduced to a dust bunny in the 1980s.

There's no tragedy in the unraveling of how Mata Hari is played by both the French and German armies at the moment their top commanders catch her eye in a museum. There's nothing to invest in the estranged friendship between these sporting rivals, Karl von Bayerling (Christopher Cazenove) and Georges Ladoux (Oliver Tobias). And any chance for engaging with the various assassinations, mutinies and counterattacks is thrown way off balance by both a sloppy script and the film's awareness of its own sexploitative sensationalism.

So when Mata Hari makes love to a solider on the train to Berlin, they are rudely interrupted by a poison blow dart landing in the stranger's back. Her interrogations lead her to cross paths with nefarious Fraulein Doktor (Gaye Brown), who specializes in psychological manipulation at the cost of Mata Hari's romantic interests with von Bayerling. The disgraced dancer is then pinballed between working for von Bayerling and Ladoux, all the while antsy viewers anticipate the latest flash of skin from Kristel, whether it be from masturbating in the bathtub (replete with keyhole-peeping imbeciles) or a topless fencing bout against a spitfire contessa.

By the time Mata Hari has been row-boated to Java by the amorous von Bayerling, learns about the magic of invisible ink and makes her way across German battlefields to rescue her mortally wounded paramour, Fraulein Doktor has constructed a time-bomb which Mata Hari races to defuse. Of course, she is captured by the French and awaits her inevitable martyrdom in the firing line. Yet the plotline is overstuffed and so portentous that it stomps all over any chances for tension or pathos. What should be a resonant conclusion turns out to be one more bogus filmmaking choice, which is nothing new in the dumpster files of Golan-Globus.

Despite his renown in independent horror circles, Curtis Harrington wound up on the opposite side of the coin compared to Tobe Hooper. Whereas the Texas Chainsaw Massacre auteur invested his trio of Cannon productions with all manner of perverse idiosyncrasies, Harrington (Queen of Blood, What's the Matter with Helen?, Ruby) fails to liven up the movie enough to distract viewers from the locked-down locations (Budapest badly doubling for all European locales) and perfunctory cinematography (by Cannon regular David Gurfinkel of The Apple and Revenge of the Ninja). Under his auspice, Harrington gives Mata Hari a chintzy look which is not helped by the unwieldy performances and the undependable plot.

I mostly concluded that Mata Hari was basically a romance novel heroine writ mythical, torn between two lovers and helpless against the dogs of war. Take out the erotica and all that's left is but a Stephenie Meyer prototype. If you want a shorter, sexier take on this material, watch the middle vignette of Second Time Lucky instead.

Cannon Fodder: The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood

THE HAPPY HOOKER GOES HOLLYWOOD
(R, Cannon Films, 88 mins., theatrical release date: June 4, 1980)

[Morgan Spurlock, eat your heart out on a sesame seed bun with special sauce. Five movies into my retrospective series Cannon Fodder and I can feel my brain turning into porridge. The goal is to write at least five more reviews, give or take Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films, but this is now officially the masochistic thing I've ever done!]

Ever heard the Cinderella story about the Dutch ex-secretary who became the belle of the balls?

Before Heidi Fleiss, there was Xaviera Hollander, the infamous "Happy Hooker" who came to manage her own brothel after becoming the go-to prostitute of late 1960s New York. In the wake of her deportation to Toronto, Hollander released an autobiography which was voraciously frank about her many sexcapades. She then became an advice columnist for Penthouse ("Call Me Madam") for roughly three decades, before finally spending her golden years in Amsterdam running a bed-and-breakfast.

The real life story of Hollander is so fascinatingly risqué and free-spirited that when The Happy Hooker became a bestseller, it was only natural that enterprising film producers wanted to option her tell-all for show business. It took one failed X-rated effort from Larry Spangler, notoriously sued by both Hollander and the Disney empire (listen to the 42nd Street Forever Volume 3 DVD commentary on The Life and Times of Xaveria Hollander), before there was a legitimate version of The Happy Hooker for the cinemas, released in 1975 and starring Lynn Redgrave in the title role.

Incidentally, the same year saw the actual Xaveria Hollander make her screen debut in Al Waxman's My Pleasure Is My Business, which, based on the write-up from Canuxploitation, seemed to inform the future sequels to The Happy Hooker. The first, The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, borrowed the thread of Waxman's film, wherein a prudish government latches onto Hollander as a scapegoat for their own indiscretions. Hollander proves herself a heroic "liberator" when the CIA coerces her into putting the make on a sheik, but much of what has come before is reliably Seventies broad comedy light on coherence but big on T&A.

You can understand why Lynn Redgrave wouldn't be interested in reprising her role, so Joey Heatherton filled in and wound up fitting in with the renewed emphasis on trash. But then came The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, which recast Xaviera Hollander for a second time and once again landed a performer who bore no physical resemblance to either Hollander or her previous onscreen avatars. She was Martine Beswick, best known for her appearances in two Connery-era 007 vehicles (From Russia with Love, Thunderball) as well as wrestling Raquel Welch, the both of them immortally clad in animal fur underwear, in One Million Years B.C. (advanced studies include the Spaghetti western A Bullet for the General and Oliver Stone's debut oddity Seizure).

Happy Hooker ‘80 also marked a more important baton-passing than the presence of Beswick, as Cannon Films were under new ownership by this point. Yes, Golan-Globus took time out from the teenage soft-porn of Boaz Davidson's Lemon Popsicle "saga" to renew Cannon's flagship series of adults-only erotica. Not that the result was any less juvenile.

The perverse thing about early '80s sex comedies was that they didn't become trendy again until they were targeted specifically at teenagers. Suddenly, the older generation passed down their well-worn memories of coitus interruptus and other related shenanigans to a gullible new demographic and were reaping fool's gold in the process. The antics of Porky's and its subsequent cash-ins were already tapped dry by the time The Hollywood Knights came right out and ripped off both American Graffiti and Animal House in one fell swoop, but that sure didn't matter once the inundation of Privates and Virgins and Classes took hold.

Take Private School for example, in which the horndogs were so desperate they resorted to drag costumes to enter the girls' dormitory. Nowadays, the scene is remembered purely for Betsy Russell's striptease more than any comedic genius on part of the writers and director. The benchmark for this type of cross-dressing farce is, of course, Some Like It Hot, where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon went incognito as girlie musicians so they wouldn't be offed by gangsters. When Billy Wilder directed Some Like It Hot back in the era of the Hays Code, this contrivance was a lot less sniggering and relied on joint sophistication in performance, dialogue, cinematography, and wardrobe/make-up to make the jokes come naturally. The magic would later be diluted by bumbling opportunists who bought into the whole "girls as pastries" credo without so much as a lick of authentic talent.

The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, released roughly two years before Porky's, rehashes the same shtick, although Jack's own son, Chris Lemmon, dodges that bullet. Here, aged hams Adam West and Richard Deacon are forced into posing as ladies due to a practical joke which has left them, to pilfer another cliché, sans clothing. They are amorously pursued by a drunken coot who rides the elevator and spurs one of them into throwing an ill-fated punch. The scenario plays out as more embarrassing for West and Deacon, though, than for their characters, because the filmmakers have severely let them down.

That's essentially what this movie is: 85 minutes of dignity-damaging disappointments. And those three Ds are heavier than any of the breasts on show, including Martine Beswick's.

Full disclosure: I fell asleep halfway through watching this movie the first time around. In retrospect, I should've stopped there. When a movie peaks early with a cameo by Dick "I'm more than just a goddamn porn name" Miller as a randy policeman whom the Knapp Commission couldn't tame, there's really nowhere left to go but Dreamland. I can just imagine Dick Miller playing the hippie Jesus of The Apple, the land-grubbing Venarius from Enter the Ninja (sorry, Christopher George) and the cackling pharmacy clerk from The Last American Virgin, and I'm laughing. Boy, am I laughing.

I instead must wake up to find Phil Silvers in a gold wheelchair reciting lines like "Let bygones be spilled milk" as if they were off cue. Sgt. Bilko, missing in action. Seriously, my Dick Miller parallel universe is way more hilarious and fantastical than anything in The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood.

Silvers plays W.B. Warkoff (geddit?), the ass-slapping mogul from the salad days of Robert Lippert with his eyes on translating Xaviera Hollander's bestseller into blockbuster cinema. Good luck picturing that based on the ensuing dullness.

Our Madam intercepts the news and flies off to Tinseltown to ensure they don't make a botch of her story in the same manner as...well, you know who.

She meets with unscrupulous producers Lionel Lamely (Mr. West) and Joseph Rottman (Mr. Deacon), the former Playboy-ing (boing?) his way into Hollander's sensual graces despite conniving with a bitchy actress to sabotage the project. Madam is mistaken for a whore, and instead pairs off with idealistic Robby Rottman (Lemmon Popsicle!) to go indie. She amasses a budget with a little help from her stable of sultries, but that dastardly Warkoff has a few more tricks up his sleeve.

Will the film ever get made?

Can Xaviera deliver to it Warkoff in time for premiere night and collect the $5 million promised her?

Will you be amazed when a packed house doesn't audibly groan in unison after watching a preview of The Apple?

Shall I stop right now and focus on something else, like Revenge of the Ninja or Making the Grade?

Find out next time whether or not Cannon continues to blow  Same bad-time, same bad-channel. Or at least until we all forget to remember the phrase "Bouncy, bouncy."

 

Cannon Fodder: Bolero (1984)

BOLERO
(NR, Cannon Films, 105 mins., theatrical release date: August 31, 1984)

[Welcome back to Cannon Fodder, a series devoted to my endurance of a handful of films produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who were Hebrew National yet far from kosher. This is honey-drenched foreplay to precede my review of Mark Hartley's well-received Cannon doco Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. Last time, I took a willing bite of The Apple, which at least was spirited in its stupidity. All I can say here is that, "This is a low, Bo..."]

In 1984, Cannon Films hooked and crooked their way to an original breakthrough in the film scene, releasing the Breakin' movies to a wide audience and thus getting a pop 'n' lock on the hip-hop/dance vehicle.

Unfortunately, between those youth-oriented highs lay the adults-only Bolero, one of Menahem Golan & Yoram Globus' all-time greatest follies.

In another attempt to profit high by aiming low, our Israeli anti-heroes turned to actor-turned-auteur John Derek and his wife Bo Derek. Not only was Cathleen Collins infamously less than half John's age, but John discovered her as a teenager whilst he was still wed to Linda Evans in the early 1970s. After they wed in mid-decade, Cathleen went by the stage name of "Bo" Derek and was debuting in Orca: The Killer Whale, followed by her iconic role as the mysterious object of desire in Blake Edwards' 10.

The Dereks remained passionate lovers until John's death in 1998, with husband working hard to preserve the sex symbol status of his wife in the pages of Playboy and on the silver screen. Unfortunately, the projects they concocted were transparently opportunistic and incredibly tasteless. 1981's Tarzan, the Ape Man was the first strike, followed mere months later by their eight-years-old, Greece-located pet project Fantasies. 

Bolero was the film which effectively told both John and Bo Derek "You're out!"

That was their fate despite a massive media-hyped controversy over Bolero's distribution and lack of an official MPAA rating. Cannon were producing under the MGM banner for a brief time (the sleeper success of Breakin' was one of the results), but Bolero was bad enough for Frank Yablans to demand a legal escape clause from the studio's contract with Cannon (apparently, it didn't extend to home video distribution). Golan & Globus decided to release it themselves, but John Derek, who was pressured by his producers to make the film more "erotic" than the Dereks already intended, didn't present this film to the MPAA for fear of getting the scarlet X. Instead, Bolero went out unrated, with many theaters having to impose the "no one under 17" rule themselves.

The Dereks and Menahem Golan took blows to each other in the press, with Bo claiming that her private collection of on-set photographs were stolen by the studio and copyrighted as publicity stills. The producers were ashamed of the project so much, they wanted ownership on Mr. & Mrs. Derek's ranch as compensation. Whatever the beef between these clashing egos, Bolero made a quick recoup of its budget after two weeks but then tapered out and stalled at roughly $9 million domestic gross. The film's petering profits as well as its deluge of negative reviews guaranteed a sweep at the coming Golden Raspberries, winning six out of nine nominations.

But time has a way of redeeming even the most abortive artifact of its time, right? 

NO!!! It doesn't!

I was reminded of that when I watched The Apple, and now it's even more applicable to Bolero. To paraphrase a Freudian adage, sometimes a fiasco is just a fiasco.

This dual desecration of Rudolph Valentino and Maurice Ravel's funeral plots replaces the silent film era's unspoken campiness with a deluge of head-slapping exchanges that don't deserve to be printed on old-timey title cards (which John Derek actually does!). And despite being named after the composition which soundtracked Bo's nudity in 10, Ravel is nowhere to be heard, the dishonor going to guest conductor Elmer Bernstein, whose son Peter scored every other piece of music outside of the love scenes. Try as he may, Elmer B. is no better suited to orchestrating endless soft-core set pieces than John Williams is, and the climax (so to speak) visually and sonically conveys "eerie" more than "extasy," which is actually spelled out in neon as a beacon amongst egregiously-used dry ice fog.

A running joke involving this grammatical error is genuinely contrived to endear the viewer to Bo Derek, who I steadfastly refuse to acknowledge even plays a character here. In a vanity project as relentless as Bolero, she isn't virginal young Lida MacGillvery, a supposed bonnie lass with a Yank accent who graduates from an English prep school so she can inherit her father's fortune and put it towards a Euro-peon vacation. There is no plot involving this hormonal vacuum of higher education having saved herself for passionate intercourse with a dark, handsome stranger straight out of a Valentino non-talkie. There are no million barrels of wine, hookahs of opium, underage nudie shots, or castrating bulls.

No, Bolero is Bo and John Derek's celluloid passport to Morocco and Spain, with the most rudimentary attempt at an Emmanuelle sex fantasy to frame it. This is Bo Derek at her most unbearable as she one-ups Olivia Newton-John, who convinced more playing a liberated high school sweetheart in Grease than Derek does here as a wide-eyed ingénue. This is two stuporous scenes of simulated sex buttressed by bad comedy and even worse melodrama. This is, like a lot of Cannon's output, too much of a smug slog to provoke the kind of titters which stick out more than the titties, two of which, need I remind you, belong to a 14-year-old!!

Don't let this "European sensibilities" bullshit justification (I've heard it used to excuse Cannon's Lemon Popsicle movies, and it's flimsier than Bo's costumes) distract from the undisputed truth that Bolero is the pinnacle of pretentious crassness. It is not entertaining, it's certainly not erotic, and it's not even worth 1000 words of cathartic dissertation.

So, Bo Derek as "Mac" has her romantic ideals dashed when the sheik of her fancy (Greg Bensen) turns out to be an Oxford-poet pretty boy who can't hold his smoke and sinks into narcolepsy. Whoop-de-har. Then she locks onto a dreamy rejoneador, Angel (Andrea Occhipinti), who shows mercy by not slaying his charges to the public's disinterest. He doesn't sell toros, but vinos. He's also an in-demand stud, with both a feisty ginger-haired suitor and his "gypsy shadow," Paloma (Olivia d'Abo...14-year-olds, Dude), clamoring for Angel's pene.

"Mac" uses her daddy's trust fund to essentially buy her way into entitled ecstasy...oh, I'm sorry, "extasy." She gets deflowered, we get demeaned. But that's not enough, so Angel has to sever a nerve ending in his nether, giving "Mac" all the motivation to goad Angel back into potency: "Don't take it out on me just because you got cute with a damn bull!"

By film's end, you'll have accrued all the earnest agony needed to wish that wily mammal has made it impossible for these two to procreate for the rest of their lives.

Not even Mark Hartley could condense this movie in such a bite-sized way as to make Bolero any more salvageable.

Never mind the pitiful attention to period details ("As Time Goes By" is played on piano in a casbah: written in 1931; associated with a beloved movie released in 1942; having fuckall to do with the 1920s), the ludicrous tonal shifts (the dejected Sheik hunts down "Mac" and has her kidnapped apropos of nothing, with an equally pathetic resolution) or the fact that Bo comes across as perpetually silly rather than sensuous, even in the over-ballyhooed sex scenes.

What really awards Bolero the all-time booby prize is the writing and direction of John Derek. He was a lecherous photographer masquerading as a legit fillmmaker. There is no evidence in Bolero, in his handling of dialogue, performances and scenery, that John D. could achieve at all the pure whimsy which would've helped make this film even the teensiest bit easier to take. He has no flair for editing, as Bolero boasts many of the single worst transitions, montages and abuses of slow-mo in any major motion picture. He makes his wife come across as glassy-eyed imbecile rather than a living centerfold. He likes to throw in fully naked 14-year-olds for spice (the more age-appropriate Ana Obregon, for the most part, keeps her clothes ON as brunette BFF Catalina, who puts the sniggering make on "Mac's" Scottish attorney). And he makes one want to walk inside the movie not to covet his lusty S.O., but to instead put the valiant George Kennedy, as long-suffering chauffeur Cotton, out of his misery, Old Yeller-style.

Good for George that he gets to woo Angel's maid, though. Maybe we can put him down after his conquest, like Jason Voorhees would. At least he can die with joy and some sliver of dignity. 

Bolero, meanwhile, deserves every disgrace, the epitome of exhibitionism at its most exhausting. I wouldn't even recommend it to the video voyeurs who would be most satisfied from easy access to the money shots.

I don't even want to devote another precious sentence except "Good riddance."