For a brief, glorious period back in the day, probably about the time when I was in the fifth or sixth grade, our family had HBO. Now, we weren't allowed to tell people we had HBO, because we had one of those nifty little decoder devices that allowed you yo just flip a switch and descramble the signal to premium channels (Illegal? You bet!). We didn't have it terribly long before the cable company's technology sent the homemade descrambler the way of the Dodo, but it was fun while it lasted.

What I remember most about that time is staying up late on the weekends, well after everyone else had hit the hay, and watching the movies that came on in the wee hours. You know the ones. Post-Porkys, Post-Fast Times teen flicks that followed a group of horndog guys through their misadventures trying to "score." Well, I thought it would be interesting to revisit five or six of these movies for a little series of reviews.

My Tutor
(1983)

In this taboo tweaking tale, a rich man hires a tutor to help raise his son's test scores in order to gain entry into the hallowed halls of Yale. Before long, the attractive, older woman is teaching the young man much more than daddy bargained for.

As the film opens we find over-privileged, vaguely effeminate, and infinitely whiny Bobby Chrystal (Matt Lattanzi) failing to make the grade on a final exam, but the real humiliation comes later that evening when he and his two bumbling buddies can't even seal the deal at (horror of horrors) the local whore house. The next day, things go from bad to worse when Bobby learns that his father will be cutting his summer vacation short by hiring a live-in tutor to help him pass the test.

Television vet, Caren Kaye plays part-time tutor/part-time aerobics instructor (seriously, are all the women in these movies aerobics instructors?), Terry Green who arrives at the sprawling Chrystal estate to tutor young Bobby in... wait for it... French. Of course, it's not long before the two begin making like the bunnies do. As their relationship develops, it soon becomes clear that the end of the summer not only brings with it the dreaded French exam, but also the end to Ms. Green's horizontal tutelage.

It's hard to say why My Tutor stood out in my mind as one of the better of the 80s teen sex romps from back in the day. It certainly couldn't have been the riveting story. Re-watching it, I was kinda surprised by how simplistic the plot was. It seemed like the filmmakers tried to go the Fast Times at Ridgemont High route and mix comedy with realistic teen drama, but the stakes in this one were just too low and the characters completely unsympathetic. Really, I'm sure that my infatuation with this movie had more to do with the fact that the BPMs (boobies per minute) clocked in astoundingly high. Seriously, I might have to watch this one again with a stop watch to calculate the avaerage amount of time between boob exposure. It can't be more than five minutes.

More than anything else, this movie is interesting because it is the film debut of Crispin Glover, and while the goofy Jack character is underdeveolped at best, you can still see the beginnings of Glover's bizarre onscreen persona. It's like he purposely uses that strange phrasing he does to give this peripheral character in a subpar movie a real presence. Also worth noting in this film are two gloriously cringe-inducing songs that represent all t hat is simultaneously good and bad in this genre. The My Tutor theme is a porntastic, falsetto-groove that'd sound just at home in one of those local commercials as in a feature film. "The First Time We Make Love" tries to be a sweetly endearing ode to love and affection, but falls short as the smarmy soundtrack to statutory rape. Even taking these interesting aspects into consideration, unless you're some kind of 80s Skin Flick completist, I suppose you don't have much reason to check this one out. Giving the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt... the subject matter might have been sexy in the eighties, but in a post-Mary Kay Letourneau world, it'll probably just make you wanna take a shower.

Random scooter wipe-out from My Tutor.

Labels: dvd