Preppies

If there's one thing about my year-long deep drive back into my favorite year of cinema that has made me understand why so many people, especially film critics who had to watch everything that came out, don't share my reverence for 1984 in film, it's been having to sit through so many terrible sex comedies and teen sex comedies if the year where this genre hit it's lowest point. By this year, we'd seen the release of several examples of this genre were genuinely good films—Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Risky Business, Valley Girl,, hell, I'll go to bat for Porky's and The Last American Virgin. In 1984, Sixteen Candles was released, which marked a shift in how these films were made, at least by major studios. But a huge mound of quicky, slapdash examples of the genre would continue to be released and made in 1984 and beyond.

The first official work of cinema from the Playboy Channel is this lame Porky's knock-off that makes Bob Clark's period teen sex comedy look like American Graffiti. Writer/director Chuck Vincent, who worked for both Yale Repertory and the Negro Ensemble Company as a stage manager and sometime director, churned out a slew of hardcore X-rated movies from the early 1970s and mid-'80s before shifting (kinda) to legit features like this one, Hollywood Hot Tubs, Whimps, and Deranged. Preppies capitalized on the term popularized by the best-selling satirical reference guide The Official Preppy Handbook, published in 1980. By the time "Preppie" had worked its way fully into the culture of slobs-vs-snob sex comedies, these snooty upper-class fashion nerds were far more the butt of the joke than when the book came out. In this movie, three Ivy League college students are in danger of flunking their final exams, which would cramp their future, especially the guy whose inheritance is conditional on getting straight As. The person who stands to inherit the family's fortune if this kid does fuck up hires three sexy young townies to distract the boys so that they don't have time to study.

The film's production values are barely above early '80s promo-level quality. Of course, it's hard to judge from the terrible VHS copy I watched, but everything that's meant to look ritzy in terms of depicting the elite world of these rich assholes comes across as low-rent as what passes for jokes. The swanky country club where some of the action takes place seems to have been shot under a rented wedding tent set up in the back of a VFW, and the main guy's "mansion" looks like it was filmed at a local library. Some shots that made the final cut feature clouds rolling in and altering the camera exposure by several stops—which really sells the high-end setting. The lead guys are all one-note drips played by actors who make you wish they had studied how characters like these were portrayed on the worst TV sitcoms of the day and just copied that.

Fortunately, the female actors are, across the board, not only sexy and game for everything this movie calls on them to do; they are all more than up to the task as actresses. These gals include future writer/director Katt Shea (Stripped to Kill. Poison Ivy, The Rage: Carrie 2, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase), model Lynda Wiesmeier, and first-time actor Cindy Manion. Jerry Butler, the African-American porno actor who starred in some of Vincent's earlier X-rated movies, has a key role. They, and the fact that editor Clement Barclay (assistant editor on American Ninja and Runaway Train) cuts every sequence within an inch of its life, making the whole affair clock in at 83 minutes, makes Preppies watchable... but just barely.