Summerfest '08: "Summer School"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

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.

(Belated) Take Five: Stephen King

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

So, have you heard of this Stephen King fellow? Apparently he’s pretty widely read. Hs popularity as a novelist is matched only by his profligacy — he’s written over thirty novels and hundreds of short stories on his way to becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time. This level of popularity is like heroin to Hollywood producers, and adaptations of his books and stories — as well as original screenplays by King himself, an inveterate movie nerd — have led to an astonishing 100+ films and television shows. Like their source material, though, they’re a decidedly mixed bag: for every Shawshank Redemption, there’s a Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return. And just as King enjoys a decidedly muddled critical reception, films made from his works, while occasionally made by talented filmmakers who find in the material the bones of something great, tend towards third-rate exploitation horror. Still, with The Mist having opened last week, it’s good to remember that a number of genuinely worthwhile projects have made the translation from the mind of King to the big screen. Here are five of the best.

CARRIE (1976)

The first hint that Stephen King’s novels might be the stuff of memorable movies came in 1976, when Brian DePalma got hold of his tale of a shy, stunted teenage girl who happened to have vast telekinetic powers. As the rest of this list will make clear, it’s no secret that King’s books tended to make good films only in the hands of a competent director, but DePalma in particular blew the doors off of this one, picking out the meaty insides and discarding the extraneous baggage. Ratcheting up the tension of King’s patented adolescent-angst narrative and turning the end into something beyond gore and well into Grand Guignol territory, DePalma also delivers one of the best jump-out-of-your-seat shocks in horror movie history near the end of Carrie.

SALEM'S LOT (1979)

The story of a small town infested by vampires was one of King’s first big successes as a novelist, and this TV movie adaptation — helmed by horror maven and Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper — does a terrific job conveying its sense of paranoia and night terror without resorting to gore or cheap thrills. Indeed, working within the restrictions of television seemed to suit Hooper and screenwriter Paul Monash, who paced and teased the moments of shock out quite effectively. They’re also aided greatly by a cast crammed full of top-shelf character actors, including Elisha Cook Jr., Fred Willard, James Mason, Ed Flanders and George Dzundza.

THE SHINING (1980)

Not a lot of genuinely great directors have taken on the works of Stephen King, but Stanley Kubrick was unquestionably the greatest. Made only three years after the publication of the novel, The Shining is a work of genuine genius, containing one of Jack Nicholson’s greatest screen performances, some absolutely tremendous camerawork, and a sense of creeping horror that’s absent in many of the plodding, obvious shock films made from King's work. (Amazingly, the best-ever movie adaptation of a Stephen King novel was one of King’s least favorites; he later helped a far-inferior TV movie reworking into existence.)

CREEPSHOW (1982)

In a perfectly wonderful and appropriate twist of fate, one of Stephen King’s best friends is zombie auteur George Romero, and while Creepshow, their only true collaboration (King wrote the screenplay and Romero directed) isn’t the best movie based on the horror writer’s works, it’s easily the most enjoyable. The two sought to recreate the goofy, gory tone of the EC horror comics they had both enjoyed in their youth, and they succeeded to an admirable degree — and if the overall feel of the movie, as well as a hysterically nutty performance by King himself, are any indication, they had a hell of a time doing it.

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)

The story of a man who can see the future, and whether or not he has the chance to alter it, is a pretty whoozy old trope in science fiction, and to be honest, it doesn’t fare all that much better even in the hands of a man who, like Stephen King, can lend a patina of respectability to even the hoariest stock plots. David Cronenberg does what he can with the material he has, but it’s not the script or the direction that makes The Dead Zone worth watching: it’s the lead performances, most especially Christopher Walken (sublimely nutty as usual) in the role of the seer and Martin Sheen (hamming it up like nobody’s business) as a politician he suspects may someday trigger a nuclear war.

— Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab : the texas chainsaw massacre

Summerfest '08: "Summer School"

(Belated) Take Five: Stephen King