Playing it rude and crude in South Florida

Press, 4 October 1982, Page 7

Playing it rude and crude in South Florida

at the cinema

PORKY’S Written and directed by Bob Clark This is an old-fashioned movie with a moral: If you peek, you're liable to get a soapy tongue. And worse. "Porky’s" (Cinerama) has a shower scene as comic as Alfred Hitchcock’s was horrifying. The entire movie is a messy romp through South Florida in the 19505. It is crude, rude and raunchy, and often very funny. You can "Get it at Porky’s” says an animated neon sign on a hog wallow juke joint out in the swamp. A crowd of high school kids hope, they can get .their share, but all they get is swindled. Angel Beach High School is well set in the early 19505. Dwight D. " Eisenhower is president, the school is segregated (not one black face is seen), a patriotic-sounding disc jockey exhorts his audi-

ence to rise and shine to a song by Patti Page.

With' no blacks to kick around, a school bigot picks on the only Jewish boy around while his father, an ex-convict bikie, eggs him on.

Everyone has a nickname. The little guy, the one even more obsessed by girls than the others, is Pee Wee. The big guy, who wants a scholarship to Princeton and does something horrible to a bowl of chili when he gets turned down, is Meat. The ones in between are your usual assortment of clean-cut teenage rowdies, cruising in their cars and hanging out at a hot dog joint called Deadbeats. But they crave the action that a bevy of Cuban striptease dancers can give them over the county line, out at Porky Wallace’s place in the Everglades. They have already had a run-in with one exotic dancer, Cherry Forever is her professional name, but that was a cheat and a cold disappointment. Now they want the real thing; Porky gives them a night to remember, but not the one they wanted, and the scene is set for revenge.

. Meanwhile, back in high school, Miss Beulah Boughbreaker — a gym teacher — is on the lookout for a tallywacker with a telltale mole attached, and her search for moral turpitude keeps up the pace. between dances and fist fights. This is all pretty familiar stuff, what with “American Graffiti” and "Grease" and "Animal House" over recent years. But it is handled very well here. This is the way teenagers were meant to live — pulling raw egg/hard boiled egg jokes on each other, worrying themselves sick over girls, acting in cahoots with the school coaches when an outside evil threatens to destroy one of their own.

“All you need is a watermelon and two jelly donuts," says one kid as he burst through a scene. For what? We’re never told, but it’S fun to guess. Other mysteries are explained explicitly, such as why they call. Miss Honeywell Lassie when she finds herself in the boys’ locker room.

The good guys are quickly sorted out from the bad in this movie, and Porky is soon for the chop. He and his place are big targets. There is a plaque in the floor that marks a Record Spit of 1952, and drunks are rolled out in wheelbarrows. A pink Pigmobile sits outside. Decadence is all around.

Who best to clean it up, and give Porky his own night to remember, than our gang from across the county line? Revenge is sweet and noisy. ' —Stan Darling