Nowadays, just about every blockbuster of note gets a simultaneous X-rated “parody.” Remember when your favorite ABC sitcoms of the 1970s got similar treatment? No? Well, it happened to Barney Miller, Happy Days and Welcome Back, Kotter, poor things — all three sword-skewered in one crappy softcore comedy called Hey! There’s Naked Bodies on My TV! Whether it should have happened is debatable. I think it’s obscure for good reason.
Because every good (and bad) anthology requires something to tie them all together, a janitor stops sweeping floors to watch some television. Not to spoil anything, but his presumably favorite shows all have sex on the brain. Checking out the boob tube throws the man for such a loop, he literally — and worriedly — looks to the camera and yells this movie’s title. But of course he keeps watching.
In the first show, Happy Daze, cool dude The Bonz introduces Putzie and pals to easy women who will take their virginity. In the second, Don’t Come Back Kotler, cool teacher Mr. Kotler introduces Vinnie Malatestes and pals to easy women who will take their virginity. The third and final segment, Bernie Milner, shakes things up by having the cops not be virgins, but easy women (including Flesh Gordon’s Candy Samples) are part of the formula. (Old, dirty cartoons in rickety shape play in between.)
As if you needed telling, jokes are sub-Catskills at best. That writer/director Mack Campbell (probably a pseudonym) uses the same laugh track as the actual series is a creative choice that goes from amusing to unsettling lickety-split. With the primary purpose of Hey! being to ogle female flesh, it plays like the pages of a Tijuana bible come to life, but written by kids on the playground. Those kids missed a good pun by not having the fake shows be produced by “Norman Leer,” but at least they didn’t miss the opportunity to give proper context to the Fonz’s trademark “Sit on it!” —Ed Donovan