Category Archives: Comedy

The Vampire Happening (1971)

After an incognito viewing of herself in an adult movie shown on a commercial airline (!), American actress Betty Williams (Pia Degermark, Elvira Madigan) lands in Transylvania, where she has just inherited the requisite spooky old castle whose basement is laden with torture devices specifically for use on naked women.

The place also bears — bares? — a nude portrait of her great-grandmother, Baroness Clarimonde (also Degermark), who looks just like her, except that Betty’s hair is blonde to her ancestor’s brunette. Also, Clarimonde is a vampire who emerges from her coffin and corrupts nearby villagers, in particular the leering Catholics next door. Seduction follows, several times over.

All this culminates in quite the swingin’ party-cum-orgy where the guest of honor is none other than Count Dracula himself (Ferdy Mayne, Conan the Destroyer), who swoops in on his own branded helicopter, flashes the devil’s horns to his admirers, and goes inside to enjoy a banana. If you couldn’t tell by now, The Vampire Happening is a stab at sexy horror comedy à la The Fearless Vampire Killers, but minus the touch of Roman Polanski. (In his place is Hammer/Amicus vet Freddie Francis.)

In the most riotous scene, Betty flashes a monk from her window, prompting the lust-suffering holy man to the imagine all the surrounding trees as naughty parts, moss and all, like something from the height of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker era. Speaking of, the gay male flight attendant gags in the opening scenes are as un-PC as Stephen Stucker’s running ones in Airplane!, but not as funny. In fact, little in Vamp Hap is truly funny, but the movie is so odd, so laden with nudity, so goofily self-aware, you gotta see it anyway. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Just One of the Guys (1985)

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t have firsthand experience dealing with the misery that comes from being a smoking-hot, 18-year-old girl (but if you do, please feel free to email us — with an attached photo). Luckily for us, though, we have Just One of the Guys to share with us the insight our own lives thus far have failed to provide.

Terri (Sandra Bullock lookalike Joyce Hyser) is a high school reporter who believes she isn’t taken seriously because of her impressive rack. In order to test her theory, she decides to transfer to a nearby school and pose as a male student (where she is accurately described by female admirer Sherilyn Fenn as looking, “like the Karate Kid”).

Speaking of a certain Ralph Macchio movie, professional ’80s asshole William Zabka shows up to play the school bully who picks on “Terrance” and her new friend, Rick (April Fool’s Day’s Clayton Rohner), whom she inevitably falls in love with and has to flash in order to prove she’s a lady-girl and not a really cute gay dude.

While lacking the verisimilitude that made the concurrent John Hughes films so special, Just One of the Guys has a fun, timeless quality that keeps it from being another dated ’80s teen comedy (and as a bonus, it has a much happier ending than Boys Don’t Cry). Hyser is a genuinely charming lead, and it’s a shame her work here didn’t allow her to go on to bigger and better things. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

Cheerleaders Wild Weekend (1979)

One thing I truly love about watching forgotten exploitation films are coming across moments where the filmmakers manage to transcend their obvious limitations (be it budget, talent or a combination of both) and create a sequence that truly stands out as something far more memorable than it has any right to be.

For the majority of its running time, Cheerleaders Wild Weekend (aka The Great American Girl Robbery) is little more than a blatant excuse to connive scenarios in which its titular characters are compelled to expose their breasts, but hidden at the end is a genuinely engaging heist sequence as breathlessly enjoyable as anything you could expect to see in a major studio film of the era.

So what I’m saying is that to get to the good part of this movie, you’ll have to sit through a lot of nudity featuring a bunch of attractive young women dressed in short skirts and very tight T-shirts. There are clearly worse ways to spend your time.

As the kidnapper/mastermind/former pro football player, co-writer Jason Williams (of Flesh Gordon fame) manages to walk the hero/villain line surprisingly well — at least enough to earn the final moment of connection he shares with the film’s nominal heroine (Kristine DeBell, a Playboy cover girl who went hardcore in the X-rated Alice in Wonderland before moving on to mainstream fare like Meatballs and The Big Brawl).

The rest of the performances are mostly abysmal, but in that amusingly porno way, that actually adds charm to a production rather than detracts from it. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

Eurotrip (2004)

Found National Lampoon’s European Vacation too mature and sophisticated? Then Eurotrip is for you. Not only is it from the producers of Road Trip, its plot seems like a discarded draft of Road Trip. After being dumped by his girlfriend on the day of his high school graduation, Scotty (Scott Mechlowicz) receives an e-mail from his German pen pal, who suggests some face-to-face consolation. Wrongly believing Mieke to be a guy, Scotty tells his online friend to “fuc off,” only to learn that Mieke (Euro pop tart Jessica Boehrs) is, in fact, a hot blonde. His hasty reply results in her blocking his e-mails, so he foregoes a summer internship to hightail it to Berlin to explain himself. (Couldn’t he just have e-mailed her from another account?)

Accompanying him is the requisite annoying/horny best pal, and because no Hollywood teen-trip movie is complete without crazy shenanigans and hee-larious misunderstandings, they also encounter enraged soccer hooligans, a robot mime, a creepy Italian guy (SNL’s Fred Armisen), lots of scraggly naked fat dudes, oft-topless hookers and, most belabored, the Pope.

Eurotrip aims for crude laughs and earns some in gags involving a cymbal-playing monkey, David Hasselhoff and the aforementioned Armisen. But much of it is just being vulgar or stupid for vulgar and stupid’s sake. I guess either you find a near-incestuous encounter between inebriated brother and sister incredibly humorous or you don’t. Ditto a kindergartener who apes noted Jew-killer Hitler, or a impoverished girl peeing while standing up on the sidewalk. I’m sure the kids will eat it up.

It’s worth noting that minute for minute, Eurotrip contains more gratuitous nudity than any movie of recent memory; the film is bustling with breast-rubbing, barely dressed prostitutes and public sexual encounters … and, unfortunately, dozens of uncircumcised Europenises in full view. Not since The Exorcist has the big screen seen such horrors. How in the hell did they get Matt Damon to cameo? —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

S.O.B. (1981)

The late Blake Edwards is probably one of the last filmmakers you’d ever think would dip his toes into the murky waters of post-modernism, but it’s impossible not to notice the meta qualities of S.O.B. (we’re told it stands for “Standard Operational Bullshit”), his ode to the crass insanities of the filmmaking industry.

How else would you describe a movie about a filmmaker who attempts to create a hit by baring the breasts of his movie-star wife — a famous paragon of onscreen innocence and virtue — that just happened to be made by a filmmaker who was attempting to create a hit by baring the breasts of his movie-star wife, who just happened to be Maria Von Trapp and Mary Fucking Poppins?

Unlike the film within the film, the sight of Julie Andrews’ breasts didn’t cause anyone to rush to the box office, but that doesn’t mean S.O.B. isn’t a classic satire of early ’80s Hollywood culture. While occasionally overly broad and at least 30 minutes too long (I would have cut most of the last 20 minutes and everything to do with Loretta Swit’s gossip columnist), the movie is often laugh-out-loud funny and features an amazing cast doing what they do best.

This includes William Holden, appearing as a slightly happier version of the same character he played in the similarly themed Network; Richard Mulligan as the crazed producer who decides to transform his G-rated flop into a X-rated hit; a young Rosanna Arquette, who doesn’t say or do much, but who is braless and topless just long enough to earn a mention; and Robert Preston, who easily steals the show as the laid-back physician who’s seen it all at least twice, and done it himself at least once.

And, because you are wondering, despite the fact that Julie Andrews was 46 when the movie was made, they’re real and they’re spectacular. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.