Wondering why Summer School is still funny 33 years later and a lot of these Police Academy-style movies are dated? It was directed by Carl Reiner, who knows funny.

It was written by Jeff Franklin, who was also behind Just One of the Guys and created Full House and its Netflix spin-off Fuller House, which he was removed from after #metoo complaints. Oddly enough, he owned 10050 Cielo Drive, which he demolished and replaced with a new house before listing it for sale in 2019.

Phys Ed teacher Freddy Shoop (Mark Harmon) just wants school to be over so that he can go to Hawaii, but when Mr. Dearadorian (Reiner) retires, he gets stuck teaching summer school.

He’s left with the worst kids in school for the best time of being a teacher, which would be summer vacation. There’s Pam (a pre-Melrose Place Courtney Thorne-Smith), male exotic dancer Larry (Ken Olandt, syndicated series Super Force); Kevin the jock (Patrick Labyorteaux brother to Matthew), pregnant Rhonda (Shawnee Smith, The Blob), Alan the nerd (Richard Steven Horvitz, the voice of Alpha 5 in Power Rangers), Jerome (Duane Davis, who was in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master), exchange student Anna-Maria (Fabiana Udenio, Alotta Fagina from Austin Powers), Denise (Kelly Jo Minter, Maria from The Lost Boys) and horror film lovers Dave (Gary Riley, Charlie from Stand by Me) and Chainsaw, who is played by Dean Cameron, who this horror-obsessed fan knows was Ralph in Bad Dreams and Ralph the vampire in Rockula.

Will Freddy get Robin the history teacher (Kirstie Alley) to fall for him? Will the kids all graduate? Will there be an extended viewing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Will hijinks, as I always say, ensue?

Of course.

This is the only Danny Elfman soundtrack that has never been released. There’s also E.G. Daily’s “Mind Over Matter,” which was originally a Debbie Harry song that she recorded and had some success with.

Ah man. More people should know about this movie. Here’s hoping that my little write-up convinces you to give it a chance.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This review originally ran on April 8, 2019. Let me tell you, this is a movie that I will never tie of. Where is the blu ray release with all the extras of this, I ask you?

My wife asked me, “Why would anyone watch this movie?” She doesn’t get it. She wasn’t around in the 1980’s, when we had no internet. She wasn’t going through puberty. She’ll never understand staying up until 3:15 AM to catch a movie about a Hamburger University and the joy that it can bring.

Russell Proco (Leigh McCloskey, who improbably is also in Argento’s Inferno) has been kicked out of multiple schools because he can’t stop hooking up. There’s a trust fund waiting for him if he can get a diploma. So he picks the one school he knows he can graduate — Buster Burger University.

You know why the 1980’s were great? Because Dick Butkus could be in a movie and we all knew exactly who his character was. Here, his job is to beat the hell out of the students so they don’t screw up Buster Burger. Everyone has to follow the rules:

1. Outside consumption of food is prohibited.
2. All candidates are to stay on the grounds of Buster Burger University until graduation.
3. Since sex and success make lousy partners, all candidates are not to engage in sex while students.

This is a movie that follows the best formula: just get a bunch of crazy characters together, get them into some insane situations and let the hijinks ensue. Along the way, Russell makes a friend who is obsessed with the CEO’s sexy wife (the pneumatic Randi Brooks, who also is in TerrorVision), a nun who for some reason is going to burger school, a sex-crazed guerilla fighter, a soul singer who was arrested and is at the school on work release and so much more.

Where else other than Buster Burger University can you learn to yell things like “Put those cookies back, motherfucker,” get stuck inside a giant pickle and then have to battle against bikers and cops on your first day of work?

Most amazingly, director Mike Marvin would go on to make a movie that is even less connected to reality, The Wraith.

The Police Academy cadets have graduated and have now been assigned to the worst precinct in town, where they have to help Captain Pete Lassard (Howard Hesseman) fight Zed (Bobcat Goldthwait) and the Scullions gang.

Let me tell you — a 13-yer-old Sam definitely watched this at the Spotlight 88 drive-in outside Beaver Falls, PA and laughed like a lunatic. Nothing has changed for 47-year-old Sam, except he watched this on Netflix, even though he owns two different Police Academy box sets.

Chief Henry Hurst (George R. Robertson) gives Lassard thirty days to turn around the 16th precinct or the job will go to Lieutenant Mauser (Art Metrano) and Sgt. Proctor (Lance Kinsey). This leads to Lassard calling up his older brother Eric (George Gaynes) and getting six new officers: Carey Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg), Larvell Jones (Michael Winslow), Eugene Tackleberry (David Graf), Douglas Fackler (Bruce Mahler), Moses Hightower (Bubba Smith) and Laverne Hooks (Marion Ramsey).

This is when Tackleberrt falls for Sgt. Kathleen Kirkland (Colleen Camp, Clue, Wicked Stepmother). And we’re introduced to the adversarial and soon friendly relationship between Zed and Carl Sweetchuck (Tim Kazurinsky).

Bill Paxton was offered the role of Zed, but turned it down as he didn’t want to sign to be in any sequels. How strange would that have been?

You can make fun of these movies all you want, but they made peoples’ careers. For example, Bubba Smith went on record saying that he made more money from this movie than playing NFL football for a decade. That’s because he asked for 2% of the film’s profits instead of a higher salary. Smart guy.

Also known as Loose Ends, this is an attempt to use the name of the Screwballs franchise — such as it is — while using Coleen Camp from Police Academy and Police Academy 4 to somehow try and make a new series, because this movie has nothing to do with Screwballs other than the knowledge that both movies are Canadian exploitation tax shelter films.

Camp plays Liberty Jean, who has moved to Wagatno Beach — really Canadian sex movie location Wasaga Beach — to make a movie called Say Cheese all about the way women are treated in the world. Of course, it’s also the kind of movie I’d watch, so the local religious group the Church of the Divine Light and their leader Bishop Wally (Damian Lee, the director of Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe) decides to start a holy war.

Directing this whole mess is John Blanchard, who was the director of many episodes of SCTV and The Kids In the Hall, so he should know funny.

That said, it is on YouTube, so if you want to endure it like I did.

Also known as Heavy Metal Summer, this movie seems to be about Johnny Rocket and drummer Louis, who are on their way to Los Angeles to be part of the Sunset Strip hair metal scene in the three years they have left before “Nevermind” comes out.

It’s also about Eve (Kim Myers, A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2) trying to win the Weewankah Wilderness Challenge so she can go to college. She’s helped by Linnie (Jennifer Inch, Screwballs) and Marsha (Isabelle Mejias, Julie Darling in the flesh!), but more. importantly, those two just want to hook up with guys.

This movie from Screwballs director Rafal Zielinski, who also made Last Resort, the one with the Coreys, not the one with Charles Grodin, and Recruits. Somehow, he was able to get Ted Nugent to show up for this movie, which shows how close Detroit and Canada really are. Actually, the movie is set in Michigan, despite being filmed up north. And by up north, I don’t mean Northern Michigan.

Man, that’s a joke you’d only get if you were from Michigan, which may be another reason why this movie isn’t so well known.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

Are you ready for the movie that won USA Networks’ B-Movie Awards for Best Picture and has the honor of being their highest-rated late-night film when it first aired on cable television?

How about a Police Academy ripoff with Ginger Lynn and Linnea Quigley? Are you prepared for that?

What if I told you that RIck Sloane, the maker of Hobgoblins, was the creator?

Yeah, you’d watch that.

Holly Wells (Ginger Lynn, the one-time queen of VHS adult films) goes legit, teaming with scream queen Linnea Quigley, who plays Didi, to enter a vice school where cops learn how to bust adult movies and prostitution.

Tamara Clatterbuck, who is also in Hobgoblins and was a dominatrix in UHF, is Tinsel while Jean Carol is the evil Queen Bee. Karen Russell also shows up and you remember her from films like Hellbent, Phoenix the Warrior, Dr. Alien and Shock ‘Em Dead.

Jayne Hamil also makes the first of her five appearances as vice academy teacher Miss Thelma Louise Devonshire. And hey! The actress using the name Christian Barr who plays Cherry Pop is actually Allison Barron, who we all know as Helen from Night of the Demons.

Ginger Lynn isn’t the only adult star in this. The late Viper, a former ballet dancer who eventually left the adult industry and became a phlebotomy technician is here too.

This is a movie so cheap that the girls all wore their own outfits and Ginger drives her own car in the opening. Are clothes and cars why you’re watching this? I dare say no.

You can watch this on Tubi or grab the blu ray set of the first three films from Vinegar Syndrome. It features interviews with Lynn and Quigley, as well as commentary Rick Sloane.

Sam (Christopher Atkins, The Blue Lagoon) and Max (Perry Lang, The Hearse) inherit the Grimm Mortuary and Academy, but as these things go, they must graduate from it to actually own it. Trying to keep them from achieving that goal is the current owner, Dr. Paul Truscott (Paul Bartel) and his assistant Mary (Mary Woronov), who want to keep the school and mortuary because they both suffer from necrophilia.

I often discuss the perfect check the boxes of movies. Between Bartel, Woronov and a hijinks comedy, I was sold.

Directed by Michael Schroeder, who also worked with Bartel for the movie Out of the Dark, this movie sets up a slapstick crew of students, like one that yearns to bring dogs back from the dead and an effeminate singer played by Stoney Jackson, Phones from Roller Boogie.

Making this movie nearer to my heart is an appearance by Dona Speir, who made so many of the Andy Sidaris movies so much better.

James Daughton (Greg Marmalard from Animal House), Nedra Volz (Moving Violations), Tracy Walter (Bob the Goon!), Wolfman Jack and Cesar Romero all appear. This movie isn’t for everyone and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The band that plays in this movie, Radio Werewolf, was Radio Werewolf, who advocated vampirism, socialism and black-humored lyrics about Nazism. Their co-directors were Nicholas Schreck and Zeena Lavey Schreck, the daughter of Anton Lavey.

You can watch it on YouTube:

Stuart Margolin did more than play Evelyn “Angel” Martin on The Rockford Files. He directed plenty of TV shows and this 1988 Police Academy takeoff.

George Newbern (Poochinski!) is Uptown and Christopher McDonald (Shooter McGavin in a rare babyface role!) is Mad Mike, two, well, paramedics who get moved from uptown to the streets and come across a corpses for cash scam.

Karen Witter, Playboy’s March 1982 Playmate of the Month plays Danger Girl, a woman so sexually adept that she girls nearly every man that she sleeps with, like Ray Walston of all people, who starts the film up being dominated by her. If you ever wanted to see Mr. Hand get mahandled, this would be the movie for you. I won’t judge your kink.

That is Leigh Hamilton from Hocus Pocus playing the dispatcher, but not her voice. Listen hard — it’s really Sally Kellerman. Lydie Denier — a Zalman King vet — always shows up.

You may not know the name Hugh Wilson, but you probably know his work. He created WKRP in Cincinnati, Frank’s Place and The Famous Teddy Z, plus he directed The First Wives Club, Burglar, Blast from the Past and Guarding Tess.

He was the director of the first Police Academy, a film that every movie this week is really all about.

Producer Paul Maslansky got the idea for the film while making The Right Stuff, as he watched a gang of mismatched police cadets getting screamed at by a sergeant. He claims that the group was “an unbelievable bunch-including a lady who must have weighed over 200 pounds and a flabby man of well over 50. I asked the sergeant about them, and he explained that the mayor had ordered the department to accept a broad spectrum for the academy. “We have to take them in and the only thing we can do is wash them out.””

Boom. Police Academy.

The mayor wants to improve the police force, so he asks that the academy accept willing recruits, regardless of gender, body weight, skin color or age.

One of those unwilling recruits is Carey Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg), the everyman who we follow throughout the first of these movies and their sequels. He keeps getting in trouble for standing up to authority and his father’s friend Chief Hurst — out of respect for a fellow cop — demands that Mahoney either go to police academy or prison. Mahoney agrees if he can bring along a noisemaking man he just met, Larvell Jones (Michael Winslow).

Guttenberg was made for this, as just like his character, his father was a cop.

Lieutenant Thaddeus Harris (G.W. Bailey, an enemy cop in nearly every one of these films) wants to wash the candidates out. Mahoney wants to quit. And when he’s not daydreaming, Commandant Eric Lassard (George Gaynes) wants his cadets to do well.

As I always say, hijinks ensue. Mahoney sends the two mean cadets to a gay bar called The Blue Oyster that I promise you, most Japanese people still use as a cultural touchstone for what gay bars look like. Hightower (Bubba Jones) is protective of the quiet Hooks (Marion Ramsey). Tackleberry (David Graf) loves guns. Leslie Barbara is chubby. George Martin is a ladies man. Douglas Fackler (Bruche Mahler) is accident-prone.

Pretty much every character gets a one-note that they will use for the rest of the film if not the rest of the series. But hey — it’s honestly really funny. Maybe it’s because I was twelve when I first saw it. Or it could be that I’m still twelve inside.

For the first film, Leslie Easterbrook’s Sgt. Debbie Callahan isn’t on the side of the good guys, but she will be soon. And Georgina Spelvin from The Devil In Ms. Jones has a memorable cameo.

The Police Academy movies often feature people before they become famous and then are sore spots on their resumes. For this movie, that person would be Kim Cattrall, who plays Mahoney’s love interest. She will not be the last big star to wander into these films, often in one of their first starring roles.

I also love that the “shoe polish on the megaphone” came from a prank played on British director Michael Winner (Death Wish, The Sentinel) on the set of one of his movies.

President Bill Clinton told Guttenberg that this was one of his favorite movies, and that watching the films helped him through a difficult time. We can only assume that this was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I wonder how hard he laughed at the oral sex joke.