Screwballs

1983 teen sex comedy

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Four mischievous high school boys receive detentions, and the chaste Purity Busch is partially to blame. They challenge each other to get their revenge by deflowering her.

Purity Busch sounds like a Bond girl. I can't decide if something like this is completely harmful or harmless. It's possibly a prelude to a deluge of shit, a film that manages to be both way ahead of its time and way behind the times simultaneously. Supposed-teen girls are objectified, breasts are exposed, a giant hot dog is abused. But does it hurt anything? The whole thing beings with a giant hot dog gag before moving things to Taft and Adams High (naturally) where we're introduced to the central characters. And that high school seems like a pretty realistic look at 80's secondary education. You've got a girl playing with a yo-yo, another kid playing with an airplane, a guy wearing a gas mask inexplicably, food fights, make-out sessions on cafeteria tables, a lot of hula-hooping, cafeteria bicycle rides, and meat locker masturbation sessions. The latter, by the way, apparently would only get you a detention, by the way. That's the 1980s for you. Oh, wait. This is supposed to take place in the 1950s, I think, but you really wouldn't know it from looking at anything in the movie. Actually, I might just be confused about when this is supposed to take place. Who cares? Is anybody even reading this? Am I even writing it? Part of me wants to give this some bonus points for a scene featuring sex with a stuffed animal, a scene that puts me just one away from completing a sex-with-a-stuffed-animal trifecta. It also has a scene at a drive-in where the kids are having sex while The Wild Women of Wongo plays. I don't know how much of another movie you're allowed to use in a movie, but this must push it to the limit. I think about thirty minutes of this eighty-minute film is The Wild Women of Wongo actually. I also liked a bearded guy with a pipe, one of the strip club patrons. He gets his one second of fame here, but I couldn't find a name for him. And I was fond of all these extraneous animal sound effects. Really, it was just sound effects in general, I guess. Some sound effects guy really took this as his opportunity to shine. Then, there's the biology teacher named Anna Tommical played by Raven De La Croix, the star of such hits as The Double-D Avenger, The Breast Things in Life Are Free, and Frankenstein vs. the Creature from Blood Cove. Here's here imdb.com picture, one apparently taken during her vacation to the inside of a kaleidoscope:


I do wonder what happened to all these kids. I'm too lazy to look them up to see if any of them had a notable post-Screwballs career. That, or I really don't want to spend any more time with this movie.

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