At Harrad College, they preach and practice free love. Boys and girls are paired up as roommates, encouraged to plug away and attend morning yoga sessions in the nude. This is all fine and dandy if you’re a smooth and suave ladies’ man like Don Johnson, wearing a beret and neckerchief, but a little daunting if you’re, well, Bruno Kirby (City Slickers).
Ironically, Bruno’s character, Harry, warms up and gains confidence with his skinny, sexy roomie (Laurie Walters of TV’s Eight Is Enough), whereas Stanley (Johnson) finds out — thanks to his homely partner, with whom he bonds over pot farming — that love can be, goshdarnit, so, like, complicated.
As heads of the school, James Whitmore (Planet of the Apes) and Tippi Hedren (The Birds) are top-billed, but hardly in it, to make room for all the young wangs and thatches. That Hedren, mother of Melanie Griffith, later would become Johnson’s mom-in-law in real life lends their sex-charged scenes a higher level of creepiness.
Certainly the wildly dated The Harrad Experiment remains an embarrassment to all involved, which makes it top-notch, unintentionally hilarious entertainment for you and me. “All involved” includes Ted Cassidy (Lurch on TV’s The Addams Family), of all people, for helping pen the screenplay, and director Ted Post, for whom only The Baby tops this for sheer weirdness among his CV. And about the only thing more unsettling than seeing Fred Willard in a flick like this is knowing that Brillo-haired comedian Marty Allen did the following year’s sequel, Harrad Summer. Zoom, zoom, zoom! —Rod Lott