Unlucky in love, career cop Cooper (Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line) is nonetheless married, albeit only to police protocol. So anal-retentive is she on duty that when Cooper hears a young man excitedly tell his friends that he calls “shotgun,” she takes it as a threat to public safety and tases him. Ha.

A redemptive shot arrives for Coop when she is assigned to help escort a cartel narc and his wife to Dallas to testify against a Colombian drug lord. Upon pickup, however, the narc is murdered — ha? — leaving his rich-bitch insta-widow (Sofia Vergara, Machete Kills) in Cooper’s care, with the bad guys in … wait for it … Hot Pursuit!

Like Midnight Run stripped of testosterone and edge, the chilly Hot Pursuit is a broad comedy in both senses of the phrases. Witless and nutless, the material is far beneath an actress of Witherspoon’s talent. We know she can do comedy (for proof, see Alexander Payne’s Election), but she’s chosen not to be funny here (nor has anyone) and she’s even on board as a producer! Meanwhile, Vergara, the tube’s reigning sex bomb thanks to the ratings juggernaut that is Modern Family, proves as shrill as she is shapely, yelling her sub-sitcom lines with a ferocity that makes Kevin Hart look shy and reserved.

For such a female-powered production, directed by The Proposal’s Anne Fletcher, Hot Pursuit comes packed with gender politics oddly out-of-sync with the times. For example, (attempted) punch lines are built upon such cavemen-era concepts as “Periods are icky!” and “Policewomen look like lesbians!” Ha and ha, respectively.

When your end-credit bloopers can’t even pull a smile out of the viewer, something is horribly, irrevocably wrong. (Just ask Burt Reynolds, Reese.) Let the record show that while I ironed shirts as the Blu-ray spun and purred, I found watching the movie to be the least desirable of the two tasks. Kill me now. —Rod Lott

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Without having the National Lampoon name affixed to it, the 2015 Vacation has its cake and eats it, too, serving as both remake and reboot. Whether it’s as successful as the ’83 original is almost beside the point. That Chevy Chase vehicle is a true comedy classic; to try to top it would be futile, so Horrible Bosses screenwriters-turned-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein don’t. They simply aim to be funny.

Chase’s bumbling, well-meaning patriarch, Clark W. Griswold, drove all four previous Vacations. This time, son Rusty graduates to man the wheel. All grown up, Rusty (The Hangover trilogy’s Ed Helms, again doing the Ed Helms character, which he does well) is a pilot with a budget airlines who, like his father, just wants to spend more time with his wife, Debbie (Anchorman’s Christina Applegate, filling the Beverly D’Angelo spousal role with aplomb), and their two ever-warring sons (The Amazing Spider-Man’s Skyler Gisondo and A Haunted House 2’s Steele Stebbins). Overhearing Debbie complain of dreading yet another annual trek to a cabin, Rusty decides to revisit his most memorable trip as a child: going from Chicago to California’s Walley World theme park.

So with an Albanian Tartan Prancer subbing for the ol’ Wagon Queen Family Truckster, Rusty and fam head west, stopping in Texas to see Rusty’s sister, Audrey (Leslie Mann, The Change-Up), and her too-perfect husband (Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth). Also on the agenda, intended or not: vehicular pursuits, near-fatal white-water rafting, definitely fatal cow herding, Seal sing-alongs, sexual high jinks, suspect motels, much puke. Like father, like son.

The result is funnier and more satisfying than any of the sequels, America’s perennial Christmas favorite included. That said, one wishes Daley and Goldstein had tightened the screws on this ball, since many scenes could exist as stand-alone sketches vs. being part of a throughline. They tackle the beats of the original without gluing them into a unified whole. When Clark Griswold flipped the eff out in the original, it rang true as an eventual point on the story arc; when Rusty does the same here, the effect is lost because it feels as if a box is being checked rather than a scene receiving proper setup. So fractured is the film, I suspect the editor’s desktop trash can houses several gigabytes of excised scenes.

Still, I laughed, and a lot. From the opening strains of Lindsey Buckingham’s still-catchy “Holiday Road” theme, I immediately felt nostalgic, which Daley and Goldstein not only intended, but manufactured, given their movie’s surplus of callbacks to Harold Ramis’ playfully ribald original. (The depression caused by a late subplot may not have been on purpose.) The jokes of the ’15 Vacation may spring from a meaner place — witness the new version of the iconic Christie Brinkley gag, for instance — but they tend to make their marks, often enough that Chase’s own (sad) cameo in the third act is entirely unnecessary. —Rod Lott

Once a producer of fine repute who reached his taste apex with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 1958, Albert Zugsmith evidently ditched prestige when he decided what he really wanted to do was direct. In 1960 alone, he helmed no fewer than three movies, all of which featured his secret weapon for easy box office: the sweater-shapely Mamie Van Doren.

Two of those films utilized the word “college” in their titles, but only Sex Kittens Go to College gifted Van Doren — the poor man’s Jayne Mansfield, who is the poor man’s Marilyn Monroe — with the lead role. The 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt babe stars as Dr. Mathilda West, the new science-department professor at Collins College. She has photographic memory and a photograph-worthy frame; she boasts an IQ of 298 and a bod of 40-20-32. As one fellow faculty member perfectly puts it upon meeting this buxom-blonde genius, “Thirteen university degrees never looked like this!” But Dr. West does, and proving that brains exist behind the boobs is even tougher when she arrives on campus with considerable baggage: a former stint stripping under the nom de plume of The Tallahassee Tassel Tosser. 

Although shot in black and white, Zugsmith’s Sex Kittens has all the Palmolive-clean ingredients of one of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello’s sandbox romps: rock ’n’ roll singing and dancing, a chimp who types with his feet, a giant robot named Thinko, characters with silly names (Woo Woo Grabowski), cameos from has-beens (Vampira, John Carradine) and plenty of innocent-enough innuendo (“How do you feel about oral examinations, professor?”). But whereas no Beach Party would dare to contain nudity, the unrated version of Sex Kittens offers plenty, with an extended sequence of back-to-back-to-back-to-back stripteases excised for prudish American moviegoers. Its inclusion on Warner Archive’s “extended international version” DVD is a win for film history, but a loss for the movie, which actually posits a feminist message — one that gets bumped and ground out when Zugsmith exploits the very thing his movie otherwise claims to condemn.  

Living in its own curvaceous, carefree world, the flick is more than watchable, even if nearly every joke falls in the way that Van Doren is not: woefully flat.  —Rod Lott

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Guess the future’s not always so bright. In his Sex Galaxy, writer/director/producer Mike Davis imagines an Earth 100 years from now, when overpopulation and drought have resulted in premarital intercourse being outlawed. Up in space, however, those rules don’t reply, which is good news to the U.S. astronauts who land on a planet of hot and horny women.

Sex Galaxy is not porn, despite that title and setup. Bearing a front-to-back redub, it’s a comedy invented from noncomedic sources: educational shorts, big-boob stag loops, cartoons, PSAs and other cinematic ephemera in the public domain — some 40 titles in total. The meat on these bones comes from two extra-crispy pieces of science-fiction schlock, both originally rejiggered from Russian films by the ever-thrifty Roger Corman: 1965’s Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and 1968’s Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, respectively starring former Sherlock Holmes Basil Rathbone and buxom bombshell Mamie Van Doren. In Sex Galaxy’s sole new footage, Van Doren’s clamshell-bikinied character gets a bona fide nude scene using XXX starlet Puma Swede (Seduced by a Cougar 26, Lez Be Friends, Passenger 69, et al.) as a looks-good-enough stand-in.

Again, Sex Galaxy is not porn, despite the use and top(-heavy) billing of Swede, the performer of such adults-only fare as Screw My Husband Please! 6, Deep Anal Drilling 3 and the rather presumptuously titled White Kong Dong 1: MILF Edition. It is, however, heavily juvenile, what with a millions-year-old creature named the Vaginasaurus. But hey, juvenilia can be funny under the right circumstances and delivery; I’m partial to the all-female planet’s politically incorrect pimp robot, who doesn’t like being compared to an ATM: “Okay, I’ll be your ATM — Astronaut motherfucker Torture Machine!”

Four years later, Davis undertook this experiment in junk-culture repurposing to much funnier and all-around better results with President Wolfman. We all have to start somewhere. Luckily for him, Sex Galaxy is nothing to sneeze at. —Rod Lott

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To my knowledge, Student Bodies is the only slasher film in which the killer not only wears green rubber dishwashing gloves, but dispatches victims with paper clips and eggplant. It should be noted that Student Bodies is also an outright spoof — and a damn good one — of the subgenre’s biggest hits at the time, including Halloween, Friday the 13th and When a Stranger Calls.

Reportedly directed by Fletch’s Michael Ritchie, but credited to screenwriter Mickey Rose (a frequent Woody Allen collaborator in the earlier, funnier days of Bananas, et al.), the under-the-radar comedy plays fast and loose. Unafraid to be supremely silly, it takes place at a high school where the pupils perish due to an asthmatic heavy breather voiced by producer Jerry Belson (Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again), arguably the biggest name in the go-for-broke cast. Novelty comes in the form of an onscreen body count and arrows calling out such horror clichés as unlocked doors and windows. That’s a gimmick, but Ritchie/Rose hardly rest there, as gags fly at a ZAZ-approved speed, per the Airplane! model.

Like Airplane! just before it, the movie is smart in its stupidity. For example, a man returns home to find a Kentucky Fried Chicken drumstick in pieces on the kitchen floor; naturally, he picks it up and returns it to the fridge … but only after Scotch-taping the poultry piece back together.

Coming 19 years before, Student Bodies is the Scary Movie of its day. It even outdoes Scary Movie in the laughs department — not too daunting a feat, I know, but all the more impressive considering it had so few targets to parody. —Rod Lott

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