Hot Dog ...The Movie

Of all the notoriously horny, low-brow teen sex comedies made in the 1980s, Hot Dog... The Movie is one of the few that is better than you remember it. As dirty movies go, this is good, clean American fun. What comes across most when revisiting many of the teen sex comedies of this era is that most of them were made by people who thought they were hilarious but clearly possessed no understanding of how comedy works. But Hot Dog doesn't really try to be funny—or, if it does, it fails in a way where the jokes don't land with a crashing thud or an uncomfortable silence because they aren't really registering as jokes. So what we get is a thin, harmless, silly story on which to hang incredible skiing footage.

The movie is probably most notable for making producer Edward S. Feldman enough money to follow up its lucrative success with films like Witness, The Explorers, The Hitcher, Near Dark, and The Truman Show. In 1983, Feldman was a known producer with a few quality titles on his resume, like John G. Avildsen's Save the Tiger (1973), which had won Jack Lemmon a Best Actor Oscar. But most of his roster was stuff like the Burt Reynolds/Yul Brynner cop comedy Fuzz (1972) and the kid-friendly Kenny Rogers vehicle Six Pack (1982). Feldman met up with skiing documentarian Mike Marvin when Marvin was trying to make a film version of Jim Harrison's novella Legends of the Fall. Over a dinner, talking about the various drafts he had written of a Fall screenplay, Marvin regaled Feldman and another producer with stories from his years making sports documentaries about extreme skiing. These were fairly debauched tales, including one in which Marvin and his film crew checked into an upscale ski resort around 3 am, found no one behind the front desk, but saw a beautiful naked woman visible in a hot tub behind an open door. A guy with goggles slowly emerged from under the water and the woman got out of the tub, grabbed a towel, and came to check the guys in—but rather than covering herself, she merely wrapped the towel around her wet hair. This anecdote and many others made their way into the script for Hot Dog that Feldman commissioned Marvin to write after this night of stories. He felt if Marvin could simply change the main character in his tales from a ski filmmaker to a downhill competitor, they'd have the makings for a great horny comedy.

Hot Dog began life as a quicky TV feature for the Playboy channel, which is why there are a number of then-famous Playboy playmates in the cast and an abundance of bare breasts throughout the movie (though that was certainly not unusual for this period in teen cinema). The star power is limited to David Naughton, the lead in An American Werewolf in London (1981), who was then the Dr. Pepper guy in popular TV commercials, and Shannon Tweed, Playboy's 1982 Playmate of the Year. Tweed had been Hugh Hefner's live-in romantic partner and would later marry Kiss frontman Gene Simmons (who would make his non-Kiss acting debut in 1984 as the villain in Michael Crichton's Runaway). Hot Dog became a major studio release because of its relatively high production values and the combination of sex appeal with first-rate skiing footage. It fits well enough into the slobs-vs-snobs subgenera of teen sex comedies epitomized by films like Animal House and Caddyshack.

Patrick Houser stars as Harkin Banks, a young and ambitious "hot-dogger" determined to prove himself in a freestyle skiing competition. He hails from the flat lands of Idaho, but that hasn't stopped him from being a first-rate downhill champ. He's an innocent babe in the snow, carrying a guitar and singing John Denver-inspired songs. Marvin also grew up in a Dust Bowl area and played guitar as one of the founding members of the iconic folk group The Kingston Trio, so this character is probably fairly autobiographical). After meeting a pretty girl on the way to "Squaw Valley" in the Sierra Nevada range, Harkin quickly falls in with a hard-skiing, hard-partying crew who called themselves the "Rat Pack" led by Naughton as a slightly past his prime smart-alec. Harkin faces off against an arrogant Austrian pro named Rudolph "Rudi" Garmisch (John Patrick Reger). He also falls into a love triangle with a couple of hot blondes: Tracy N. Smith as the spunky young Sunny, whom he meets hitchhiking, and Tweed's more mature temptress Sylvia, who happens to be Rudi's ex-girlfriend. Everything culminates in an extended race, a "Chinese Downhill," after the formal but rigged competition.

The film is both helped and hampered by its complete lack of actual humor. The party sequences are fairly dull, apart from one sex scene set to Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf," where Tweed seduces Houser in a hot tub. This was one of the most oft-watched pieces of R-rated erotica in the entire VHS era, but the film is not especially lude, gross, or offensive by either the standards of its time or even today. For this type of movie, which features an extended wet T-shirt contest and a number of off-color characters, it's actually kinda sweet. The romance between Houser and Smith is surprisingly chased, at least for one night, and, like all the sex in this picture, it's the woman who is the aggressor and initiator. This sets the film apart from nearly all its contemporaries in that both the inexperienced, possibly virginal guy Houser plays, as well as the crew led by Naughton in the Tim Matherson/Steve Guttenberg/Dana Olsen role, are not in constant pursuit of sex and in desperate need to prove how endlessly entertaining they are with their antics. These characters were far less "aspirational" to the impressionable young folks like me, who consumed these movies back in the day, as they were relatable. It was sexy as hell to see a movie of this ilk where the women were in charge of all the seductions, and no sex scene ended in some form of prank, humiliation, or embarrassing accident.

Aside from all the randiness and frivolity being relatively balanced between the sexes, what makes Hot Dog distinctive and memorable, apart from the hot tub scene that wore out hundreds of thousands of VHS tapes in the same spot, are the incredible ski sequences shot by Marvin. Like Warren Miller and other pioneering sports documentary filmmakers, Marvin was a master sports photographer with vast experience capturing footage on the slopes in a "you are there" way, experimenting with new techniques as 35mm cameras got lighter, more flexible, and more durable. He had made to direct the film himself, but Feldman felt he needed an experienced narrative filmmaker to handle everything that wasn't on skis. Peter Markle, who had directed one short film and would go on to a rather unimpressive career that included Youngblood (1986), Bat*21 (1988), and Wagons East (1994), helmed the picture with Marvin co-producing, writing, and directing the ski unit. The two apparently clashed significantly on the tone of the picture, which probably accounts for the lack of humor but is also most likely why Hot Dog... The Movie comes off as the most innocent sex comedy that ever started out as a Playboy Channel production.