Claremont High has a new health teacher: Erika Petersen, straight from Sweden. As played by Julie Ange (in her only other role besides Girl on a Chain Gang), she shakes up the classroom, not only because she’s one juicy Swedish meatball, but because the class is now known as “anatomical biology.” You don’t need an A in spelling to know that means S-E-X!
Although Ms. Petersen is set up to be the main character of the film (and introduced to the students by Fred Willard, in his movie debut!), she isn’t. In fact, she seems to exist in her own plotline, almost entirely separate from the other. After all, Teenage Mother isn’t called Teenage Mother for nothing. Somebody’s gotta get pregnant, right?
Enter Claremore’s cutest student, Arlene (Arlene Farber, I Drink Your Blood) she of the low-cut blouse, leather skirt and big ol’ go-go boots. She’s going steady with the prudish Tony (Howard Le May), but he’s more into stock cars than her stacked curves. Enter — ahem — Duke (Frederick Riccio), the school bad boy. You don’t need an A in math to know that three’s a crowd, and it takes two to tango!
Meanwhile, back at the class, Ms. Petersen’s noble intentions of educating the kids meet an immovable force in the stereotypical crone of a librarian bothered by “vulgar illustrations” in books on the birds and the bees. You don’t need an A in physics or zoology to– okay, I’ll stop. Just know that this moral war boils over with the intensity of a tantric orgasm, leading to planted pornography, attempted rape, a successful runaway and, finally, the scene that got audiences in the theater out of curiosity, only to send them fleeing in horror: the birth of a baby.
Those few minutes constitute the only part of Teenage Mother that notorious producer Jerry Gross (The Dynamite Brothers) didn’t write and direct. Making good on his name, he spliced in medical footage of Dr. Anthony Miseo’s “Universal Obstetric Forceps” in action … as they graphically play claw machine to pull an infant from its mother’s graphically splayed-and-pried vagina. Seeing what is done to it via metal contraption is terrifying, in ways that the goriest horror films are not, because you know those are pretend.
That clinical demonstration aside, Teenage Mother plays pretend in an otherwise sanitized sandbox not dissimilar to more sugar-coated tenpins of the era, where camp value outweighs artistic demerit. With Gross throwing crime into the mix, we get one primo JD flick that, like the aforementioned vagina, is surprisingly tight. —Rod Lott
