SCREWBALLS-icon

Schlock fans didn’t know how good they had in the early 1980’s.  It was the era of gra­tu­itous nudity and smutty humor.  The “teen sex com­edy” genre was king and deliv­ered an end­less tide of jig­gle that flowed freely at movie the­aters and on pay cable t.v. sta­tions.  Everyone fond of this genre has their own list of per­sonal favorites and recur­ring item on vir­tu­ally all those lists is Screwballs, a demented clas­sic that is renowned to fans as one of the wildest, smut­ti­est and fleshi­est teen sex come­dies ever com­mit­ted to celluloid.

The script, penned by future straight-to-video king­pin Jim Wynorski and star Linda Shayne, takes place in an unspec­i­fied past era at Taft & Adams High (that’s right, T&A High).  Purity Busch (Linda Speciale) is the school’s res­i­dent vir­ginal teen-dream — and a mean-spirited goody two-shoes to make trou­ble for our heroes: hand­some horn­balls Rick (Peter Kelghan) and Brent (Kent Deuters), nerd Howie Bates (Alan Daveau), mas­tur­ba­tion obses­sive Melvin Jerkovski (Jason Warren) and hap­less new kid Tim (Jim Stevenson).

After Purity gets our heroic five­some rail­roaded into deten­tion, they vow revenge and make a bet to see who can either score with Purity first or at least see her naked.  What fol­lows is a machine-gun bar­rage of low­brow gags and bare breasts as the heroes stum­ble through an end­less array of scams — hyp­no­sis, spe­cial hid­ing places, imper­son­at­ing female teach­ers, you name it.  Purity man­ages to elude each attempt but her luck can’t hold out for­ever, lead­ing to an unfor­get­table finale set dur­ing a pep rally.

The end result takes its cues from Porky’s, Airplane and old Archie comics as it tears through its sto­ry­line at blitzkrieg speed.  Director Rafal Zielinski hits the ground run­ning and never allows the pace to flag — even the end cred­its sequence roars past at break­neck speed.  Some gags work bet­ter than oth­ers (the hyp­no­tism scene doesn’t work well enough to jus­tify the amount of time it gets) but the film’s sense of nar­ra­tive drive ensures that it never lingers on any one moment long enough to get boring.

It also helps that script packs every cor­ner of every frame with endear­ingly sleazy humor and end­less oppor­tu­ni­ties for the female cast mem­bers to remove their tops.  Wynorski and Shayne throw every­thing they’ve got at the audi­ence, keep­ing their plot­ting episodic enough to work in addi­tional high­lights like vis­its to a drive-in and a strip club that fea­tures a dance rou­tine by for­mer Russ Meyer star­let Raven De La Croix.  However, the pièce de résis­tance may be a ses­sion of “strip bowl­ing” that includes the films wildest sight gag (it’s too good to spoil, you gotta see it for yourself).

Finally, it’s worth not­ing that the film cre­ates a very appeal­ing fan­tasy world with some unex­pect­edly pos­i­tive ele­ments amidst all the smut.  First of all, the film fea­tures a major female char­ac­ter — Bootsie Goodhead, essayed by co-writer Shayne — who is sex­u­ally lib­er­ated and  never por­trayed as a dumb slut.  She does what she wants on her own terms and is prob­a­bly the hap­pi­est and most con­fi­dent char­ac­ter in the whole movie.  It’s also worst not­ing that the group of heroes is a like­ably egal­i­tar­ian crew: the hand­some guys work on equal-rights basis with the nerd and the fat guy and they all get to romp with the ladies.

In short, Screwballs deliv­ers boobs & gags a-plenty for smut-craving schlock fiends — and it does so with a gen­uinely love­able zeal for its work.  You really can’t ask for more from a teen sex comedy.

Trailer (slightly NSFW) — note that at least 3 shots are stock footage from ROCK & ROLL HIGH SCHOOL: