Corman’s Uncomfortable Sex Comedy

For a while in theaters the teen sex comedy reigned. Spurned on by the success of films like Animal House and Porky’s (which I’m sure we’ll get around to looking at eventually), these comedies, made on relatively small budgets, managed to pack audiences into seats and make hundreds of millions of dollars at the Box Office. The genre (featuring movies that were often a blend of sex farce and slobs vs. snobs storytelling) lasted for a number of decades, spawning more famous films and franchises like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Revenge of the Nerds, and Risky Business. It even saw a modern revival with films like American Pie and EuroTrip.

From one perspective I can see the appeal of these films. Sex can be funny. Awkward teens are funny. Nothing makes teens act more awkward than sex, so combining the two together can make for more comedy (at least, in theory). The trouble is that these kinds of films often feature characters under the legal age, and also frequently depict scenarios that are, shall we say, more illegal than simply awkward. It’s hard to laugh at these films when you’re cringing at the rapey situations in these films. That’s not comedy, that’s a lawsuit.

Still, with a genre as massive and popular as the teen sex comedy, it’s something I did have to cover on the site, at least to touch upon a few of the more famous entries. Amazon PrimeWhile Netflix might be the largest streaming seervice right now, other major contenders have come into the game. One of the biggest, and best funded, is Amazon Prime, the streaming-service add-on packing with free delivery and all kinds of other perks Amazon gives its members. And, with the backing of its corporate parent, this streaming service very well could become the market leader. apparently felt that way, suggesting it to me on a random browse through their comedy section that I take a look at Screwballs, the 1983 Canadian teen sex comedy produced by Roger Corman under his New World Pictures company. The film is, well, not good. In fact, I’d call it one of the worst comedies I’ve seen in a while. Not only is it not funny, even at the best of times, but it’s also hideously misogynistic and, frequently, rapey as well. It’s one that, honestly, I wish has stayed locked in a vault instead of getting licensed out to the streamers.

The film focuses on five boys at Taft and Adams (yes, T&A) high as they try, and frequently fail, to see the naughty parts of the female bodies going to the school. After each of them is caught by a teacher misbehaving (i.e. sexually harassing, or even sexually assaulting, various female students) they all get five days of detention to think about what they did. Instead of learning from their mistakes, though, they band together to try and hook up with the queen of the school, Purity Busch. Each makes their own attempts to land the girl in bed or, at the very least, see her naked, and each is met with disaster in the process. But it’s only a matter of time before they come up with a plan to see her body and, in the process, get a little karmic justice on the school (at least, so they feel).

The thing with a “slobs vs. snobs” storyline, with Screwballs absolutely adopts, is that you have to prove that the slobs were, in some way, wronged by the snobs such that the slobs getting some kind of justices is warranted. In the case of the five guys in the film – a prep, a schemer, a nerd, a fat kid, and a transfer student (and, yes, this is all the characterization you get for them) – only one of the five actually has a legitimate reason to want revenge. When he comes to school on the first day and is trying to find the boy’s gym, Purity points him into the girl’s locker room as a nasty prank. She does this knowingly and on purpose, showing she kind of sucks.

The other four, though, absolutely deserved to be in detention (and, really, worse) even if Purity was the one to turn them in. In order, they: pretended to be a doctor at the school so they could grope the topless freshmen getting breast exams; forced a girl to give a blowjob to a model of the Eiffel Tower; were caught masturbating in the cafeteria’s walk-in freezer; and, attempted to use a series of mirrors to look up the skirts of all the female students. None of these guys, in short, are good guys and all of them really should have been expelled. Detention was, honestly, far too mild of a punishment for them.

That is, legitimately, an issue with this whole genre, especially in the movies from this time period. Guys get up to some pretty egregious sexual crimes in these kinds of films and the movies tend to laugh it off as “boys will be boys”. Hell, all of the activities the boys get up to here, from activities they perform that get them in detention, to all the ways they try to get with Purity throughout the movie, are considered humorous moments. These are the comedic bits, the film is saying, and we’re supposed to laugh at them. I didn’t, and I’m not sure how many others would at this point.

The film really thinks that sexual “hijinx” are the height of comedy, as this is where ninety-nine percent of the (supposed) humor in the film comes from. There were only two times that the film actually got me to laugh, and both times were from amusing line deliveries and not from the “antics” on screen. I actually think there are some actors in the film that could deliver decent comedic lines if they were given anything to do other than ogle women and then molest them, but this is not that kind of film.

I did not enjoy this movie. When I first put it on I got about fifteen minutes into it and then had to turn it off. I was just disgusted with it. The only reason I came back to it was because I felt there was merit in being able to discuss how disgusting this film is. It’s not that I mind a film with sexual humor, or a lot of nudity. I actually think there are a few amusing sex comedies out there that are worth watching, in large part because they know how to handle the humor accordingly, and the sexual situations aren’t creepy and illegal. This film doesn’t fit that mold, clearly coming from a time where “boys will be boys” was all the explanation that was needed.

I don’t think the guys in this film are heroes, or protagonists, or whatever you want to call them. While Purity is certainly the Queen Bee of her school, and she does egg the boys on, I hardly think she deserves to be the target of their constant scheming, not does her “comeuppance” at the end of the film (where she’s stripped in front of the whole school) feel at all justified or warranted. The film needed to actually make its boys less creepy, more put-upon, if it wanted to sell them on a quest for revenge. And even then, everything else about this film would need to be rewritten to make it work for modern audiences. What happens in this film is awful, start to finish.

And yet, I can say with certainty that hardly anyone back in 1983 would have batted an eye at the scenarios depicted in the film. Reviewers considered the film sloppy, mild entertainment. Hell, Roger Ebert called Screwballs “a good-hearted, fairly harmless little movie” when he gave it a thumbs up review. Others likened it to a poor version of Porky’s (another questionable film we’re going to have to really have a conversation about at some point) but the criticism seemed to focus on the quality of the production and not, as it should have, the message it was sending to its audience.

Screwballs is not okay. This is a creepy movie that, in the decades since it came out, has aged so poorly as to be unwatchable. It was successful enough when it came out (making $2 Mil on a $800k budget, which wasn’t anywhere near as much as Porky’s but was still big money for a Corman production) that two further films in the series were produced. If we’re lucky, we’ll never have to address those films and we can all pretend they don’t exist. Something tells me the questionable behavior here will only get worse and worse as the films go on.