hollywood high [1976]
i must have a hole in my head. i watched this flick to the end credits. & i am dumber for it. not that you would expect a mid-1970s teen comedy to be high art. this flick was made for a couple of bucks & features the exploits of four teen girls, & their dudes, who attend, you guessed it!, hollywood high. so what do these kids do when they are not studying french & algebra? frolic on the beach of course! lots of skin exposed. lots of crude jokes. lots of plain dumb fun.
because, sure this movie is inept. directed by patrick wright, who had a long career in drive-in cinema, he sure liked to let his cameras roam! i mean roam! when the girls go into the surf to play the camera is right there with them. in the surf as if it too was wrestling with our comely stars. there's no focus, no framing of the scene, no shots at all for we the viewers to get a sense of the kinetic fun of the girls in the surf or if the camera was set to leer at sexy women. it's a mess!
& yet still, i powered thru these scenes for the actors, as clumsy as the non-script was, seemed to be having a blast. the plot involves the girls assisting a silent-film era star, ms. june east, a mae west type character [har har! her name!] who owns a mansion in the hollywood hills. the girls & their boyfriends have no private space to get it on. so they ask ms. east if the can take 'acting lessons' in exchange for them using her many rooms to romp with their boyfriends.
that's it. for comic relief is a cop who frequently gets lost on the streets of hollywood & so needs a map as he chases the girls as they drive around town. there's a food fight too at an italian restaurant. that looked really yummy the kids often hook up en masse so there is confusion galore regarding what body part belongs to who. everyone is randy. at the nth degree.
all that beach sand on bare skin! oh my! i kept itching for the characters onscreen! but as the movie wore on director wright began to achieve a kind of kitchen sink surrealism that won me over. the movie was still inept in its construction. yet the actors seemed to be having a blast. plus the young women were sexy in a drive-in exploitation movie 1970s california girl kind of way. it helps too that the print i watched was grainy, scratchy, with a bit of artifacting. precisely the kind of film conditions you want to see when you watch a flick like this one. a pristine restoration of the print would ruin the drive-in movie experience.
are there better movies? you betcha! even cheap fare like the latter pic van nuys blvd [1979] is a sterling example of an excellent drive-in movie. but why compare films. citizen kane [1941] this is not. after the first reel if you keep on going you have no one else to blame but yourself.
