Professedly a remake of 1960’s Where the Boys Are, Hy Averback’s final film as director, Where the Boys Are ’84, does retain the simple premise: Four college girls drive to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. Whereas the original was a bubbly comedy with a serious streak of date rape painted across its middle, ’84 dumps that paint on the floor — and flings it on the walls and ceiling — as an all-out, balls-out, R-rated parrrrrtyyyyy!

So why isn’t it any fun?

The short answer may boil down to a combo of “producer Allan Carr” and “cocaine,” but hey, you’re here already, so let’s talk.

Among our four leading ladies, top-billed Lisa Hartman (then on TV’s Knots Landing) is such a pure cypher as the studious one, she may as well be invisible. A lemon-mouthed Lorna Luft doesn’t stray far from her Grease 2 role, while For Your Eyes Only’s Lynn-Holly Johnson runs hornier than the loot from an Africa safari. Finally, in her first movie since 1977’s Record City, Wendy Schaal plays the stuffy straight arrow. Only one of the women exudes true sex appeal, and here’s a hint: It’s Schaal.

Individually and/or collectively, their characters pounce from man to man while bouncing from party to party. One is arrested for driving drunk. Drugs are taken. A gigolo is bedded. A “hot bod” contest entails suggestive motions with a sizable cucumber. And in a scene that actually provoked mild controversy at the time, the girls take a moment of respite to take turns engaging in foreplay with a blow-up doll.

With debauchery but no discernible fun, Where the Boys Are ’84 hovers just above zero. Averback (Chamber of Horrors) doesn’t quite build a story as much he does stack scenes atop one another until all the songs needed for a soundtrack album had found a home. Due to that — and especially T&A abounding from anonymous actresses — Carr’s final comeback attempt post-Can’t Stop the Music finishes as little more than a massively overfunded Hardbodies. —Rod Lott

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Crash Course, NBC’s teen-dream melding of Moving Violations and Summer School, pulls in with the shakiest of premises: Hamilton High School’s sports program is endangered due to tanking grades in driver’s education. The principal (Ray Walston, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) gives the class’ blithering, scaredy-cat teacher (Charles Robinson, TV’s Night Court) six weeks to steer it into shape, with hired muscle (and sass) from Jackée Harry (TV’s 227): “This is supposed to be driver’s ed, not a Bananarama audition!”

The crazy classroom comes culled almost exclusively from hit sitcoms of the time, including:
• Mr. Belvedere’s Rob Stone as an Ivy League-bound senior, if only he can pass the class;
• soap star Brian Bloom and his eyebrows as a juvenile delinquent with two failed tries;
• Who’s the Boss?’s Alyssa Milano as a transfer student enrolling against her mother’s wishes;
• Family Ties’ Tina Yothers as the not-so-great Santini, daughter of a cement truck driver;
• The Wonder Years’ Olivia d’Abo as the token hot foreign exchange student;
• and eventual Jurassic Park employee BD Wong as the token Asian who raps.

Somehow, every one of these otherwise functional young humans treats the automobile as alien and Gordian as performing open-heart surgery using a construction backhoe while on the nose of the Space Shuttle at launch. Accelerator versus brake, curb versus street, left versus right — never before has a movie contained so many scenes of motorists letting go of the wheel and shrieking “AAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!” in the face of opposing traffic, fire hydrants and fruit stands. To quote Bloom’s tough-talkin’ Riko, “There’s a lot you don’t know, diaper head.”

Bustin’ Loose helmer Oz Scott navigates this flat, vanilla-pudding mayhem with all the story intricacies of a Trapper Keeper. In place of jokes are a Wang Chung shout-out, a clumsy Chariots of Fire bit and Dick Butkus in a chicken suit. Harvey Korman (Munchies) says it all when his sabotage-minded faculty member yells at himself in frustration, “Why do you do things like this? Why me?”

Because a paycheck’s a paycheck, I guess. Movie drinking games are stupid, but if you were to do one during Crash Course, you’d have a Cadillac-sized liver for imbibing at each rap number, mention of “symbiosis” and usage of a rubber-plunger dart gun. You might even experience the tremors before the big closing song, “We Be Drivin’.” I not be kiddin’. —Rod Lott

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With sales of Beaver Bras sagging, ad man Albert Zack (Chris Lemmon, Wishmaster) is tasked with front-loading the next campaign with five famous curvaceous ladies to model the goods: a chart-topping singer, a Swiss countess, an Olympic wrestler, a sex-kitten actress and the daughter of the President of the United States. With that mission set, the meat of C.O.D. is watching Zack humiliate himself to make contact for contracts by donning a variety of disguises, because what else screams “zany”?

For example, the actress (Corinne Alphen, Amazon Women on the Moon) is shooting a Doctor Butcher M.D.-style horror film, so Zack dresses as a zombie to crash the set. For the singer (Marilyn Joi, Black Samurai), he dons his discotheque best. For the POTUS offspring, it’s cringingly offensive Fu Manchu garb. Hey, it was the ’80s.

One of pornographer Chuck Vincent’s earliest efforts to go legit, the PG-rated C.O.D. plays remarkably tame, even with its big-busted premise. Nudity is light enough to be near-nonexistent, and the most risqué gag requires literacy; as Zack — in a Santa Claus outfit — realizes he’s followed the countess (Carole Davis, Piranha II: The Spawning) to a Madison Cawthorn-style orgy, she chases him around a room lit with Christmas lights and a neon sign reading “THE FUCK IS ON.”

If you didn’t already know C.O.D.’s leading man fell from the same Lemmon tree as his legendary father, nothing here would shed that light. But let’s give the lesser Lemmon this: As the straight man opposite five shapely women, he’s easily likable, whereas had he played it any differently, he’d be alienating. Almost all the laughs come from first-timer Teresa Ganzel (The Toy), genuinely funny as the prez’s daughter. If she didn’t improvise much of her scene after ditching Secret Service, color me amazed. Either way, one wishes her co-stars — not to mention her writer/director — worked as hard. —Rod Lott

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Except for one performer, National Lampoon’s Another Dirty Movie represents a career low for all involved. Considering top-billed Jonathan Silverman starred in Caddyshack II, that’s really saying something, but here he inflates a used condom with his mouth and even pulls back the sides of his eyes to mimic an Asian. For veteran comedian Robert Klein, it’s the shame of having to say lines like, “Corn?!? In my poop?!? What are these nibblets?!?”

The exception is soap-opera actress Maeve Quinlan, but only because she received unsimulated oral sex for Larry Clark’s probing camera in Ken Park. So this might be one stool step up from that.

Like 2011’s first Dirty Movie (which I actually find amusing), this semi-sequel shoots filmed skits ‘n’ bits of R- and X-rated jokes as rapidly as Will Smith’s ball machine in King Richard. Only the in-between window dressing has changed, now concerning horny students Mason (Nolan Gerard Funk, The Long Night) and Patrick (Jon Klaft, co-writer with Alan Donnes), who need to make a movie — any movie — lickety-split so they can get crazy-laid. Turning to Patrick’s porno-producing uncle (Silverman), they write, cast and shoot their epic dirty-joke picture in what appears to be the same day.

From twin belly dancers to topless blondes, the onscreen gag tellers deliver such old chestnuts as “What kind of bees produce milk? Boo-bees.” Waka-waka-hey! I’d say Klaft and Donnes stole their script from a 12-year-old boy, but that would be unfair. (He couldn’t have been more than 8, maybe 9, tops.)

Other would-be comics slinging vile, tasteless (and worse, witless) wisecracks on Blacks, the Holocaust and such targets include hillbillies, Nazis, Klansmen, Middle Eastern terrorists, a sex-crazed doctor and a child actor whose parents should know better. Outside of these super-short segments, Silverman — who, mind you, also chose to direct this — cajoles celebrity pals Jason Alexander, David Schwimmer, Bob Saget and Jeff Ross into sad cameos.

So much of Another Dirty Movie reeks of desperation. The bar scenes look to be lensed in a storage unit. Only if Mel Brooks were a robot who got stuck in a loop would you hear the word “schtup” repeated more. Some actors literally turn to face the camera at punchline, because how else would the viewer know when to laugh? (You won’t.) The screenplay presumes to have its finger on the pulse of American culture by queuing up a bit about Rain Man — yes, Rain Man, as in from 1988! Prepare for a linguistic knee-slapper of the highest order as someone mishears “kitty porn” as “kiddie porn” — oh, the misunderstandings that follow!

The credits’ typeface may be appropriately bubbly to match the iconic National Lampoon logo, but Another Dirty Movie can’t approach even the least ticklish rib of Bluto or Cousin Eddie. —Rod Lott

Abandon hope, all ye who enter Mother Schmuckers, Belgium’s answer to Dumb and Dumber. The leads, played by filmmaking brothers Lenny and Harpo Guit, are even the human equivalent of Lloyd Christmas’ “most annoying sound in the world.”

As perpetually hungry, poverty-stricken brothers Issachar (who looks like Emo Philips had sex with Elijah Wood) and Zabulon (who doesn’t), the Guits lose their mother’s beloved dog, January Jack. That’s it for a story; the boys just run around town, finding shenanigans at every turn: playing with a loaded gun, eating a maggot-ridden burger, dancing in a music video. In the highlight, as it were,
Issachar uses unconvincing carpet scraps to pass for a dog to gain access into a club — uh-oh, it’s a bestiality club, yuk yuk!

Mother Schmuckers shows its stripes in the opening scene, where Issachar and Zabulon cook poop. When executed well, gross-out comedy can garner laughs so large, they strain your stomach muscles. That’s not the case here; the Guits present the situation without real jokes attached. This is not a case of European humor failing to translate to this stupid American’s brain or offending my delicate sensibilities, as Denmark’s Klown is as riotous as they come, and France’s recent Mandibles is full of laugh-aloud moments, too.

By contrast, Mother Schmuckers simply is not funny because the Guits don’t push the bits beyond merely presenting them, and that’s not enough. I laughed exactly once, at someone’s apt summation of Issachar: “He looks like a Playmobil.” At least the movie is pretty much over with after 65 minutes — a tiresome stretch in any language for gags this flat and contemptible. Comparisons to John Waters are unfair to John Waters. —Rod Lott

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