Perhaps the time was right for a horror comedy about a crazed practitioner of the custodial arts. So God gives you The Janitor — often laugh-out-loud funny and more often gleefully offensive.

In this tiny-budgeted labor of love from California, a dumpy janitor named Lionel (Honest Trailers mastermind Andy Signore) works at the offices of Generico Corporation, where members of the workforce either scorn him or ignore him, naturally. He carries a torch for a female employee who is repulsed by his very mop-pushing presence. It’s enough to drive a guy mad.

Lionel’s ambitions do not end in the halls of Generico; his dream is to ply his no-diploma-required trade at a college sorority house. He’s about to get his big break, until his janitorial partner/mentor, Mr. Growbo (Bruce Cronander, The Poughkeepsie Tapes), sweeps swoops in to steal the position out of spite, feeling despondent and betrayed by Lionel’s desire to leave. It’s enough to drive a guy even madder. At that point, Lionel — who by now already has terminated a few co-workers — embarks on a full-blown sorority house massacre.

A mix of raunchy comedy and messy splatter, The Janitor is so over-the-top, one wonders if there was a tiled ceiling to begin with. For example, Lionel has to cover up a homicide by lubricating his hand with spit in order to jerk off a fresh corpse. “Maybe next time you’ll think twice before decapitating a hooker,” scolds Growbo; it’s a long story.

For a piece of self-financed microcinema, The Janitor bears quite the coat of polish while also looking back in the well-Windexed mirror. The gore effects are H.G. Lewis-level terrific, while Russ Meyer fans will appreciate the gargantuan helpings of gratuitous nudity. Co-written and co-directed by Signore and TJ Nordaker, the movie reminded me of 1989’s infamous Las Vegas Blood Bath, yet entirely self-aware. —Rod Lott

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Many a 1980s teen comedy chronicled the wacky lengths to which horny teens would go on their quest to lose their virginity. Today, those boys and girls — and the real-life boys and girls who viewed those movies on HBO and VHS, often surreptitiously — are adults and have become parents of their own sex-crazed children, so it makes sense for 21st-century Hollywood to turn the well-worn trope on its, um, head. In fact, Blockers may be the first film to focus on Mom and Dad’s efforts to rein in the young ones’ genitalia.

It’s senior prom night for a trio of lifelong besties, and the blondest, whitest one (Kathryn Newton, Paranormal Activity 4), wants to make the special event extra-special by popping her proverbial cherry at the hotel after-party. Her pals (relative newcomers Geraldine Viswanathan and Gideon Adlon) decide they want in on the action as well. As millennials are wont to do, they make it official by christening it with its own hashtag: “#SEXPACT2018.”

Intercepting the girls’ emoji-laden group text of penetration plans, their respective parents (Vacation’s Leslie Mann, Trainwreck’s John Cena and Sisters’ Ike Barinholtz) aim to cock-block their daughters and their prom dates. Can you blame them? As a father myself, I cannot, especially since one boy ingests enough drugs to fail a month of pee tests, while another wears a fedora.

Blockers is one of those raunchy mainstream comedies rendered nearly superfluous by its tell-it-all trailer, which chronologically ticks through many laugh-baiting scenes like a highlight reel — most notably, a butt-chugging beer competition between young and old. Other audience-pleasing bids are saved for the actual feature, but all share a troubling element: They’re not as funny as they should be. Each lacks the payoff that first-time director Kay Cannon sets up, over and over. From in-limo vomiting to blindfolded sex play, the sequences end abruptly, like a DJ fading out a Top 40 pop hit before the song reaches its bridge. The Pitch Perfect movies she wrote contain more laughs, not to mention bite, so long as you do not confuse R-rated talk with, er, balls (and you shouldn’t).

To be fair, Cannon didn’t pen Blockers, which is credited to brothers Brian and Jim Kehoe. If the siblings’ script amuses, but is hardly a gem sparkling with wit, our three grown-up leads do their best to give it a polish. Mann, Cena and Barinholtz may not operate with clockwork timing, but they’re likable one and all. Cena shines in particular, deliberately railing against the pro-wrasslin’ persona that made him a star by playing a goofball whose heart is larger than both biceps. Although you wouldn’t know it from his extended cameo in winter’s Daddy’s Home 2, he continues to be something of an American treasure in the big, dumb American comedy genre. Here’s hoping his next starring role leans into his charm, and away from his big, dumb anus. —Rod Lott

Nebbish comedian Tommy Noonan (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) stretches to play a nebbish actor named Tommy Noonan. He’s unemployed, too, until he’s hired by high-class stripper Saxie Symbol (Mamie Van Doren, Sex Kittens Go to College) for an unusual weekly gig: to go to the psychiatrist for her and her two platonic roomies, narcissistic model Bruce (John Cronin, Twist Around the Clock) and car salesman Joe (Paul Gilbert, Women of the Prehistoric Planet).

See, shrink appointments are cost-prohibitive, and Saxie, Bruce and Joe reason that if they relay their neuroses to Tommy, he can attend for all of them. (Why they need to hire him at $60 a week when one of them could do the same would be a gaping plot hole, but that requires plot.) Tommy agrees and plops upon the couch of psychiatrist Dr. Myra Von (Ziva Rodann, Pharaoh’s Curse) to spend 20 minutes on the problems of each of his employers. However, being an actor, Tommy does so while imitating their voices and mannerisms, thus leading Dr. Von to see him as a special kind of schizophrenic: one worth studying. Don’t ask, but an incident involving a nudie magazine and spilled coffee causes their closed-circuit session to hit boob tubes nationwide, instantly vaulting Tommy to national celebrity status.

Are you laughing yet? You won’t. Directed and co-written by Noonan as a follow-up to Promises! Promises!, his 1963 hit with Jayne Mansfield, 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt is a sex comedy that has aged so poorly, no discernible laughs remain — and that’s assuming it had any with which to begin. Given the lack of permissiveness of the times, it also has no sex. Sure, MVD is sexy AF, and Noonan’s camera offers peekaboo glimpses of her famous bosom, including a scene that finds the starlet literally bathing in beer. As with her striptease numbers, this sequence is lovingly rendered in color, whereas the bulk of the picture was shot in much cheaper black-and-white stock.

Playing less like a movie and more like a wish-fulfillment fantasy for its creator, 3 Nuts is not the sharpest tool in the sex-comedy shed. While harmless, it also is utterly charmless. Arguably, the most interesting about it is that its production design is credited to one Carroll Ballard, future director of the G-rated future-glue movie The Black Stallion! —Rod Lott

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Based on Dr. Alex Comfort’s bestselling sex manual (but not really), Joy of Sex is, irony against ironies, a film as largely joyless as it is sexless. Paramount Pictures thought it had a potential National Lampoon’s Animal House on its hands; the Lampoon thought otherwise and took its name off the title — a smart move the brand would not do today.

The story, as it is, can be described in two lines: Mistakenly thinking she’s terminally ill, high school good girl Leslie (the appealing Michelle Meyrink, Real Genius) desperately wants to lose her virginity. Meanwhile, classmate Alan (Cameron Dye, Out of the Dark), being a young man, also desperately wants to lose his. As staged by Valley Girl director Martha Coolidge, the movie is not so much driven by plot as it is a series of one-joke, one-note sketches of scenes held together with wads of bubble gum from underneath desks.

What any other teen comedy would develop into a subplot, Joy of Sex tees up and lets sit there to die. Chief among them is the lovely Colleen Camp (Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment), a police narc working undercover as a transfer student. Not only do we not see her bust (pun not intended, yet now I cannot resist) a kid, but her character disappears. Another: Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyd plays the school coach who also is Leslie’s overprotective father; he makes it known the harm he will inflict on anyone who messes with his little girl. This, too, is never paid off.

Yet perhaps the best example of the script’s deficiencies — and a statement on the movie’s overall freshness date — concerns foreign exchange student Farouk (Danton Stone, Crazy People), who is told by Alan’s all-American buddies that the proper way to show appreciation to his host family is to compliment the evening meal by saying, “Thank you for the shit.” Cut to a dinner scene, where the utterly predictable (and wholly unfunny) punch line is kept from being delivered for such a needlessly extended time, you wonder why Coolidge even bothered. In essence, Farouk’s line functions as a microcosm of Joy of Sex as a whole: something that was finally let loose and put out of its misery. —Rod Lott

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Virtually the Ski Patrol of its day, Winter a-Go-Go marks an attempt by a major studio to muscle in on a minor’s success — namely, the cash cow that AIP was milking and milking among the collective teats of the youth market with its blanket of Beach Party romps. But leave it to the Columbia suits to not quite comprehend the simplicity of the can’t-miss formula; ignoring AIP’s surefire Frankie-and-Annette dynamic, Winter a-Go-Go opts for Frankie and, well, Frankie.

Jeff (William Wellman Jr., High School Confidential!) has just inherited the ramshackle Snow Mountain Lodge in Heavenly Valley, and his horny best bud, Danny (James Stacy, Double Exposure), possesses the entrepreneurial skills to help launch it, starting with recruiting female employees solely off qualifications of the 36-21-36 kind — a scene so lecherous, it’s practically a preamble to the TV series Mad Men. (Would you expect less of a comedy whose opening credits follow a bikini-clad skier down the slopes?) They arrive to find the lodge under layers of dust and disrepair — one stop more inviting than The Overlook Hotel, and nothing a quick, coed cleaning musical number can’t fix!

With segregated rooms (by gender, so save your outrage until the end of this paragraph, SJWs) and a bar serving nothing harder than Coca-Cola, Snow Mountain 2.0 is open for business! That business would be monkey business, if this movie had been made 20 years later. Since it wasn’t, T&A is absent, leaving director Richard Benedict (Impasse) to make do with a double-slipper pedestal bathtub’s worth of soapy subplots, ranging from Jeff being unable to pay rent to Jeff being clueless that his adorable, dream-girl secretary (Beverly Adams, Torture Garden) is all a-goo-goo over him. There are even some that don’t involve Jeff, like Danny stealing a stereotypical Chinese chef (H.T. Tsiang, 1966’s The Swinger) from a competing hotel — okay, now you can be outraged!

Audiences unaccustomed to this style of teenpic may be caught off-guard by any number of elements in need of carbon dating, from the pajamaed characters’ spontaneous group decision to rush downstairs to do the “Hip Square Dance” in the middle of the night, to now-antiquated lingo, such as one young man’s compliment that the spiffed-up Snow Mountain Lodge “is a gassy place!” And if today’s viewers can’t get past such instances, Winter a-Go-Go’s charms will be lost on them. AIP could have churned out this kind of thing in its sleep — and had, just half a year earlier with Ski Party, the fifth Beach Party sequel. While Winter is the lesser of the two, plenty of room for both exists in your heart … as long as you don’t Google whatever became of Stacy. —Rod Lott

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