Up the Creek

Reliving my favorite year of cinema, 1984, there are many films I have been quick to praise for their innovations and defend against those who weren't alive at the time and can only see them through modern eyes without the context of cinema culture in the early '80s. But the three teen-sex/sports comedies I screened on the 40th anniversary of the release of Up The Creek are not among those pictures. I'm not saying I didn't have a good time revisiting these movies with a few friends on a Sunday while my partner was at a bridal shower; I'm just saying these films are pretty much exactly what you'd imagine. Up The Creek begins with opening credits that look like they were made on an old CYRON, announcing this as a Samuel Z. Arkoff & Louis S. Arkoff Production, so you know what you're in for. These schlockmeisters make Golan & Globus look like Merchant and Ivory!

In the wake of Animal House and Porky's, we got dozens of slobs-vs-snobs teen sex comedies of varying degrees. Up The Creek is not one of the good ones. It did score a very positive three-star review from that reliable horndog, Roger Ebert, but this film was also positively reviewed by his stuffier compadre Gene Siskel; make of that what you will. The film stars Animal House's Tim Matheson and Stephen Furst as well as Porky's Dan Monahan, and the hottie from the Scott Baio/Willie Aames TV show Charles in Charge, Jennifer Runyon (who also played grown-up Cindy Brady in the '88 TV film A Very Brady Christmas for those of you keeping score). The story centers on four lovable fuck-ups from the low-rent Lepetomane University who are forced by their dean to represent their school in an intercollegiate river raft race, which is usually dominated by preppy Ivy-leaguers who are not above cheating to win.

The film is dismissed even by those who love exploitation pictures and trashy teen sex comedies because of how unoriginal and thoroughly unambitious it is. By the standards of its genre, it's fairly harmless and has as much in common with Race For Your Life Charlie Brown as it does Animal House and Porky's. The film features far fewer laughs than Police Academy, which proceeded into theaters by a month and is a movie I will go to the mat for.

The characters in Up The Creek are all one-dimensional Animal House knock-offs. Matheson, who was pushing 40 in 1984 and looks it, is delightfully smug playing the lead as if his Animal House character, Eric "Otter" Stratton, spent his entire adult life repeating his senior year. Furst doesn't fair as well, essentially playing one extended fat joke over the course of a 96-minute movie—he's aiming to be a kind of cousin to John Belushi's "Bluto" Blutarsky from Animal House, but he fails to bring even the level of nuance he found in his own character, Kent "Flounder" Dorfman had in that film. Monahan is somewhat more endearing in this film than he was as the infantile Pee Wee in Porky's, but that's only because he barely registers in the story. Seriously, did this guy or his agent read this script? He has almost no character and no lines. Sandy Helberg rounds out the foursome as one of the '80s least memorable nerds.

The supporting cast tries to keep things lively. The plot is instigated by John Hillerman, the distinguished TV actor known best for Magnum, P.I. and memorable turns in Peter Bogdanovich's early work. Hillerman takes the John Vernon role here as the Dean of Lepetomane University, who blackmails the four lovable losers into competing in this raft race. James B. Sikking, of Hill Street Blues fame, plays the leader of a military academy that gets disqualified. Of course there are plenty of sorority girls excited to get in the game and get wet. And there is a pretty great dog performance. I did enjoy the casualness of approach the slob protagonists take in going about having a good time and triumphing over their adversaries—the preppies, blue-bloods, and people who take a silly competition like the one they're engaging in far too seriously. Their adolescent hi-jinx are far less aggressive compared to other films of this subgenre.

At the helm of this rudderless ship is prolific TV director Robert Butler, whose hundreds of credits include directing the pilot episodes for everything from Star Trek, Batman, and Hogan's Heroes to Hill Street Blues, Moonlighting, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and Remington Steele (a show he also co-created). He doesn't seem to know how to edit a film for comedy, but that might be because the editor was Bill Buttler, who had gone from cutting Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange (1971) to the Gary Coleman homeless horse-racing comedy On the Right Track (1981). Up the Creek has a fun outdoor setting, but it feels like the produciton didn't get around to shooting everything that was scripted. The picture was photographed by James Glennon, the same cinematographer who shot this year's stunning El Norte, if you can believe that!