If there's one thing I can't stand, it's critics who look at the world through rose-colored glasses. The minute I hear someone gassing on about how movies used to be better back in the old days (always, coincidentally, when they were young), my eyes glaze over and my ears cotton up. Of course, the bitch of it all is that I do this myself. Everyone does. In fact, I'm about to do it right now, with the latest installment of Summerfest '08 -- the exciting new Screengrab feature where we randomly select movies from the past with the word 'summer' in the title and review them in order to let you know if it's worth watching for a couple of hours while you're waiting for the guy to show up and fix your margarita machine. Objectively, there's really nothing better about the crap movies they put out when I was a teenager in the 1980s and the crap movies they put out now; the new stuff may be a tad coarser, in keeping with the tenor of the times, but it sure ain't any stupider. And, of course, the fact that I must have watched the 1987 Mark Harmon vehicle Summer School a couple of dozen times in my misspent post-high-school doldrums doesn't mean it's actually any kind of a good movie. But I have good memories of it, and if you're looking for a near-perfect exemplar of a very particular type of feel-good comedy produced in that neon-colored decade, you could do a lot worse.
So let's hand-press our surfer shirts, bleach our teeth, and check out the latest entry into Summerfest '08: Summer School!
THE ACTION: Freddy Shoop, a proto-slacker gym teacher who was once a quarterback at UCLA and managed to avoid getting all his perfect teeth knocked out, is looking forward to taking summer off at Ocean Front High School and spending the next three months gaping slack-jawed at surfer girls. Unfortunately, he is assigned to take control of a remedial English class, made up of a wide selection of teen-movie stereotypes (the loser, the slut, the nerd, the foreign exchange student, the pregnant girl, and so on). If he doesn't succeed in getting them to pass, the Earth will be hit with a meteorite and all life will be forever extinguished, or something. Will he be able to somehow inspire this ragtag group of misfits to apply themselves to their studies? Will they manage to serve a healthy dose of comeuppance to the stuffed-shirt principal? Will the disdainful, straight-laced lady teacher somehow overcome her disdain for Freddy and fall in love? Will hilarity ensue? The answer to these questions depends on whether or not you have ever seen a movie before.
THE PLAYERS: The man behind the camera here is veteran TV funnyman Carl Reiner, which is probably why the whole thing plays more like a good-natured sitcom that's been stretched out to triple length than it does a movie. Mark Harmon plays the male lead; he was actually a big TV star in 1987, for reasons that are lost to the mists of time. Kirstie Alley, looking lovely in her pre-Fat Actress days, plays his love interest as the two gleefully cavort around on screen just as if their careers aren't about to completely vanish. One of the teen stereotypes (that would be the slut) is played by a nubile young Courtney Thorne-Smith, whose TV career had not yet begun; it's sort of entertaining to watch her goof around in that period when she had no TV career thanks to not yet having had a big break rather than thanks to her career having dried up. Dean Cameron is the real standout here, stealing the show as Chainsaw, as much as this is a show capable of being stolen.
SUMMER FUN: One thing you cannot fault this movie for is a lack of summer fun. This movie is all about summer fun. It is virtually a primer in summer fun as interpreted by Hollywood screenwriters of the 1980s. Wearing sunglasses, playing cheeseball rock music (including a handful of choice tracks from the likes of Blondie, Rick James, and Oingo Boingo), driving around in fast cars, going to beach, getting a tan, making fun of one-dimensional authority figures, and re-enacting scenes from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: it's all here. There's even some extremely mild sex and a dog wearing a lei. Someday, when our civilization has crumbled to dust, aliens will land on our dead world, and they will use this movie as Exhibit A in an outer space museum of history exhibit about Calfornia.
HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: In previous installments of Summerfest '08, Hawaiian shirt action has been, I am sad to say, sorely lacking. No so with Summer School, my friends. Mark Harmon is not big and fat, but he certainly is a party animal, and his Freddy Shoop is almost always clad in a Hawaiian shirt. But not just any Hawaiian shirt, oh goodness no! This is a genuine Duke Kahanamoku model he's sporting, of the exact same sort worn by Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity. Harmon liked it so much he added it to his personal collection, and can be seen on his somewhat more haggard frame in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fifteen years later.
BIKINI PARTY TIME: One of the subplots of the movie involves Courtney Thorne-Smith becoming homeless and shacking up with Harmon's character. Of course, she is forever trying to lure him into the sack, and of course, he is a noble fellow who would never dream of taking advantage of his innocent young charge, but for those of us in the audience who aren't quite so noble, we are treated to a number of shots of the ripe Ms. Thorne-Smith bikinied like there's no tomorrow. Additionally, goofball losers Chainsaw and Dave hatch a school project that involves going to the beach for the express purpose of seeing foreign exchange student Anna-Maria Mazarelli (played by former Miss Teen Italy Fabiana Udenio) in the latest swimwear. Hey, folks, it ain't Shakespeare, but as a sort of Platonic ideal of '80s summer-fun movies, Summer School is as good as it gets.