Hardbodies

I remembered this as being one of the most unsatisfying teen sex comedies of the '80s, and, revisiting it, I can see that may have been because it's not a teen sex comedy at all, but rather a movie about three middle-aged jerks who rent a house on the beach and pay a down on his luck smooth operator named Scotty Palmer to teach them how to cruise babes. The plan works, even though it's pretty obvious that Scotty (Grant Cramer) isn't really some master pick-up artist; he's just an incredibly good-looking and chill dude. His techniques for getting women would not work on these fat, balding, and/or arrogant old guys. But old guys have a nice, big, well-located pad and cool cars, and they have Scotty, so soon, their place will become party central until the doucheiest of the guys decides he doesn't need Scotty anymore.

This movie operates under the principle that if you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people. The younger characters' shallow and boorish behavior appears virtuous next to the eminently more gross conduct of the old dudes. We're even given four even more obnoxious old dudes to make the lead old dudes seem less awful. There are a lot of incredibly sexy twentysomething women in and out of bikinis in this movie, which is the main reason it was made and why anyone went to see it. I'll admit that looking at such women in a motion picture is a lot more arousing than seeing static photographs in a racy magazine, but it doesn't make for an especially erotic or engaging movie experience.