I don’t like the Razzies much, but I have to agree with them for once. Ghosts Can’t Do It won worst picture, worst director, worst actress and worst supporting actor for the artist who debuted here, Donald Trump. Trump and co-star Leo Damian were also nominated for worst new star, but that went to Sofia Coppola. In retrospect, that seems rather mean. Actually, it seems a lot mean because I’ve watched untold movies some would consider bad and this movie is without a doubt the very worst film I’ve ever seen.

Somehow, John Derek decided to make a movie worse than Bolero and Tarzan the Ape Man and I didn’t think he had it in him. But oh wow — he did.

Katie (Derek) and Scott (Anthony Quinn) are thirty years apart in age but have a fulfilling, sex-filled relationship. Unfortunately, he has a heart attack and learns that they can never horizontally dance again, so instead of looking into alternate therapy or a second opinion, he kills himself.

Julie Newmar plays his guardian angel, who is so bad at her job that she allows him to return to Eartha and come up with a plan where Katie will kill Fausto (Damian) and he’ll possess the body. This comes after she’s traveled the world and tried to find the perfect sex partner, all while running her husband’s business and wheeling and dealing against Trump, who plays himself.

The end of this? Fausto accidentally drowns and Scott is unable to possess Fausto’s dead body, yet when Katie revives him with CPR, Scott can possess him. Huh? I just watched this movie only to watch it change the rules in the end after hours of Anthony Quinn violently pissing all over his acting legacy in a performance that defines and goes beyond bad.

I mean, let’s look at the dialogue in this and imagine it in Trump’s bombastic tone and Bo’s stilted voice:

Donald Trump: Be assured, Mrs. Scott, that in this room there are knives sharp enough to cut you to the bone and hearts cold enough to eat yours as hors-d’oeuvres.

Katie O’Dare Scott: You’re too pretty to be bad!

Donald Trump: You noticed.

Also, if Katie’s last name is Scott, her dead husband’s name is Scott Scott?

The credits for this have this line: And Yes, That Really Was Donald Trump.

Are we to doubt that that is the man himself? Is it an android?

Also, one more time, this movie’s happy ending is an innocent man dying so that Bo Derek can keep on banging a man thirty years older than her who has spent most of the movie in a tube lit like a swimming pool bellowing dialogue while she refers to him as “Great man.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

MGM announced they had signed a deal with Lucio Pavarotti to star in this movie and he responded by saying, “I have done a lot of television and think I have the experience to do a movie. I will put myself in the hands of those making this but hopefully my sense of humor will come through.”

Producer Peter Fetterman said, “I just knew that someone had to make a movie with Pavarotti. He’s got so much charisma. A talent like his appears only once in every generation.”

Executive producer Herbert Breslin chimed in with, “We’re not going to skimp on it. We’ll spend whatever it takes to make a movie right for Mr. Pavarotti.”

The result?

$2.3 million back on a $19 million budget, but based on this Newsweek article, the estimated loss was $45.9 million. Pretty steep for a movie made because Gladys Begelman, wife of David Begelman, the COO and president of MGM at that time, was an opera lover.

But it was Pavarotti’s debut in the movies!

He plays world-famous Italian tenor opera singer Giorgio Fini — hmm, a stretch — who has mental issues preventing him from singing at the Met. That’s when his business manager Henry Pollack (Eddie Albert, I’m so sorry) introduces him to throat specialist Pamela Taylor (Kathryn Harrold from The Sender) who he refuses to see because why could a woman be a doctor?

It gets better. Or worse. Because the entire movie is him pursuing her, even though he has a wife and kids, and tells her it will mean nothing and yet, she falls for this sexist man with talent and still gets hurt, but it’s a comedy.

Franklin J. Schaffner made Planet of the Apes, Patton and The Boys from Brazil. He deserved better. Or maybe he deserves the blame because this movie is pure pain. Or perhaps it’s the script by Norman Steinberg, who also wrote Blazing Saddles, Johnny Dangerously and Wise Guys. Or could it be Anne Piper, who wrote the book this was based on?

Nah, I think we know who was at fault.

Pavarotti refused to work more than 12 hours a day and would do no work after 8PM. He would only be filmed in angles that made him look smaller, just one of the many demands that led the crew to call the movie No, Luciano.

This movie starts with “This story is dedicated to lovers everywhere.”

I hate you, lovers.

Oh no, more Bo.

Marketed with the tagline “Unlike any other Tarzan you’ve ever seen!,” this was written by Tom Rowe and Gary Goddard, who would go on to direct Masters of the Universe. Goddard had originally been hired to write a screenplay based upon the Marvel Comics character Dazzler for Bo.

And of course, this being a John and Bo Derek movie, there were issues.

As soon as MGM announced the studio was making a Tarzan film with them, Warner Bros. complained, as they were developing a Tarzan film with Robert Towne called Greystoke. Maybe they had a point, as they had the rights to the character from the Burroughs estate. MGM argued that the Dereks would be remaking 1932’s Tarzan the Ape Man, which they had the right to do, as they had released another remake in 1959. The Burroughs estate responde by suing MGM before a single frame was shot.

The original actor cast in the Tarzan role, Lee Canalito, had injured his knee, making him need a stuntman. That stuntman had to undergo an emergency appendectomy, so Canalito quit or was fired five weeks into shooting and the second stunt double, Miles O’Keeffe, debuted in the title role. You may know him as Ator or the Green Knight in Cannon’s astounding Sword of the Valiant.

Somehow, Richard Harris was in this, playing James Parker, the hunter father of Jane (Bo), who gets lost in Africa searching for a mythical white ape. James wants to capture this ape — who is Tarzan — dead or alive. Hey look! John Phillip Law is in this!

Anyways…

The natives, led by Ivory King (Steve Strong, the former tag team partner of Jesse “The Body” Ventura), kidnap Jane and tie her up nude, which is pretty much John Derek’s id on full display. They also kill her dad.

So Tarzan saves her then they make sweet, sweet jungle love. And a chimpanzee — played by CJ, who was Clyde in Any Which Way You Can — sucks on Jane’s nipple because hey, John Derek.

The most beautiful woman of our time in the most erotic adventure of all time.

See why Playboy calls Bo Derek the sexiest Jane in Tarzan history!

The Lord of the Apes goes ape for Bo Derek!

Yeah, OK.

Anyways, here’s the William Castle-level BS. Maybe.

During a scene involving Jane attempting to get away from Tarzan, Miles O’Keeffe found himself face-to-face with Neal, a full grown African lion, who protected Derek. In fact, Nea was a method actor and nearly went after O’Keeffe for real.

Now, I am not sure I believe this, except that Neal was also in Roar and everyone involved is lucky that they weren’t mauled.

Klinton Spilsbury came from Mormon settlers in Mexico and spent much of his childhood in Arizona, before his family moved back to Mexico, settling in Colonia Juárez. He briefly attended Brigham Young University before trying to break into Hollywood as Max Keller.

Once he took on the name Klinton Spilsbury — he was born Glenn Klinton Spilsbury — and he was picked for the major role of the Lone Ranger in a time when superhero and movies of past culture seemed like sure bets. To get there, they often erased the past when now the stars we love at least get cameos.

For example, Clayton Moore, star of the popular 1950s Lone Ranger TV series, was a beloved pop culture icon who had been allowed to wear a mask for personal appearances. Jack Wrather, who owned the Lone Ranger character, obtained a court order prohibiting the 65-year-old actor from making future appearances as the Lone Ranger, as believed Moore’s public appearances in character would undercut the value of the movie.

Moore often was quoted as saying he had “fallen in love with the Lone Ranger character” and strove in his personal life to take the Lone Ranger Creed to heart. Which is:

Moore was so identified with the role he played that he is the only person on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to have his character’s name along with his on the star.

Wrather’s lawsuit wasn’t just bad PR. It killed this movie.

Moore responded by filing a countersuit and then slightly changed his costume, replacing the domino mask with a pair of Foster Grant wraparound sunglasses as part of that company’s “Who’s that behind those Foster Grants?” ad campaign.

Christopher Lloyd, whose role of Butch Cavendish is one of the few bright spots in this movie, said: “I thought that was really kind of nasty and unnecessary. Nothing Moore was doing was really interfering with the film. I thought that was kind of terrible.”

Meanwhile, Andy Warhol interviewed Spilsbury during the promotion for the movie, during which the actor went off the rails claiming that before making the movie, he had been an art student married to a rich woman and that they had a baby together. He went on to state she had left him because he needed too much time with his own thoughts, as well as the fact that he had fallen in love with actors Dennis Christopher and Bud Cort. Warhol described Spilsbury as “very drunk” and that post-interview, “he’d been picked up by Halston and woke up in bed with Halston.”

Spilsbury demanded script changes as he had trouble delivering his lines, which ended up being dubbed by James Keach. He also demanded that this movie be shot in sequential order so that he could better portray his character’s dramatic arc.

He hasn’t acted in a movie since.

Speaking of Butch, the movie begins with his gang of outlaws are chasing two young boys, one a Comanche and another white, who narrowly miss their villages being attacked. The Comanche grows up to be Tonto (Michael Horse, Deputy Tommy “Hawk” Hill from Twin Peaks) and the white boy is, of course, John Reid (Spilsbury). Later, the same gang kills several Texas rangers, which include Ranger Captain Dan Reid (Matt Perry’s dad John Bennett Perry) before Tonto again saves him. Cavendish then abducts President Ulysses S. Grant(Jason Robards) and tries to start his own country.

With Richard Farnsworth as Wild Bill Hickok, Ted Flicker as Buffalo Bill Cody, Lincoln Tate as General Custer and an appearance by Billy Jack himself, Tom Laughlin, this movie was trying to get audiences to care about westerns in 1981.

They didn’t.

As for Grade, this was just one of his many film failures, including Saturn 3 and Raise the Titanic.

Two of the movie’s four screenwriters, Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, had previously created the hit TV series Charlie’s Angels. That didn’t help the film, nor did the direction by William Fraker, who was the cinematographer on two other huge bombs that I love, 1941 and Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Nor does Merle Haggard’s Dukes of Hazzard-style narration.

In his 1992 autobiography Still Dancing: My Story, Grade said he thought that the problem was that it took an hour and ten minutes before the Ranger first pulled on his mask.

There were a ton of problems beyond that.

That said, the movie gave us a great toy line by Gabriel and a newspaper strip that had gorgeous Russ Heath art. I was so excited for this movie as a nine-year-old geek and I remember asking my dad, “Why is this so boring?”

PS: Gavan O’Herlihy auditioned and almost got the role of the Lone Ranger. Although he lost out to Klinton Spilsbury, O’Herlihy made a great impression on director William Fraker and the two remained good friends. When O’Herlihy was cast in Death Wish 3, he had his character renamed after Fraker.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Ski School may have come out way after the teen sex comedy boom and before the wave that American Pie started, and you know, I may be fifty and working in the corporate world and feeling dead inside, but I would leave to join Dave Marshak (Dean Cameron, Rockula, Bad Dreams and, most essentially, Chainsaw from Summer School) and his Section 8 team on the slopes if they’ll have me, bad knees and multiple concussions and you know, old.

This movie flows over me like malt liquor at a party. I mean, it’s really the plot of every poor kids against rich elites movie ever — it’s also the plot of another skiing sex comedy Hot Dog…The Movie — but it works. Of course it works. Movies like these are why instead of speaking up for myself, I just plan long and hilarious revenge scenarios.

Ava Fabian, who is the love interest of our hero, is the kind of impossible robot who only shows up in these movies and marries rock stars. Seriously, the former August 1986 Playboy Playmate of ther Month went from this film and playing Roxy Carmichael in  Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael to being involved with Journey’s Neil Schon.

Director Damian Lee also made Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe which makes perfect and absolute logical sense. Writer David Mitchell would go on to make the sequel to this movie along with Ski Hard and Shred, which teams Dave England from Jackass with Tom Green.

Two songs on the soundtrack, “Punch Drunk” and “Half Man, Half Beast”, are by Lock Up, which is Tom Morello’s old band and man, pre-political party Tom Morello is pretty good.

You can watch this on Tubi.

At the thirtieth anniversary of Revenge of the Nerds, Julia Montgomery (Betty) revealed that she originally had a scene in this movie, but turned it down, as it had her cheating on Lewis (Robert Carradine) with a jock. She felt that after her character fell in love at the end of the first movie — never mind that whole weird assault thing — it just didn’t feel right to cheat on her nerdy man.

She was right and understood her character better than the filmmakers.

This was also the last time that Anthony Edwards would play Gilbert, as he shot all of his scenes in one day.

As for the rest of the Lambda Lambda Lambdas, they’re headed to Fort Lauderdale for the national fraternity convention. Yet even amongst their own brothers, the Lambdas of Adams College are attacked at every turn.

Now, they’re up against Bradley Whitford as Roger Latimer — finally Ted McGinley is the one getting replaced — and Ed Lauter, who has stopped bothering Charles Bronson to ruin the hijinks for our geektastic protagonists. And how did James Cromwell get cast in this?

That said, I do love that Ogre (Donald Gibb) joins the Lambdas, as well as James Hong playing Booger’s mentor, Edgar Poe “Snotty” Wong.

I guess you can’t expect the sequel to teen sex comedies to live up to the dream of the original. Then they made two more of these, including one where inevitably the nerds win and become the bullies they once hated.

James Komack is best known for producing The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Chico and the Man and Welcome Back, Kotter. To be honest, him making the third in this series is a thankless job, as Bob Clark didn’t return. He could have just been quiet about coming on board, but he told the Los Angeles Times that when Clark made the last movie that he “failed to understand their own formula. Porky’s touched on reality, it presented a cross-section of adolescent sex life during a certain time frame. Bob apparently tried to elevate his big success and use it to portray a message. But the original was not a film about humanity; it was a film, pure and simple, about teen-age sex. The sequel, a whitewash of the original, didn’t play.”

As for Clark, he was interested but also busy directing Rhinestone. He wanted the time to think of a new story, but the producers hired Ziggy Steinberg to write the screenplay, which Clark hated. He was so upset that he refused to have anything to do with this movie.

During the semi-final basketball game, the cheerleaders promise the team an orgy if they win. This did not happen in the 50s. And so the film begins, bringing back Porky (Chuck Mitchell) and most of the cast — Nancy Parsons, who played Ms. Balbricker had lost a lot of weight since the first movie and only came back if she got a percentage of the profits — and has a new character in Porky’s daughter Blossom, who is in love with Meat.

As bad as the movie is, the soundtrack makes up for it. Dave Edmunds brought together Jeff Beck, George Harrison, Willie Nelson, Carl Perkins, The Crawling King Snakes (Robert Plant and Phil Collins) and The Fabulous Thunderbirds to create music that is way better than this movie could ever hope to deserve.

You can watch this on Tubi.

After the success of Porky’s — success is a small way to describe how influential it was on the movies that would follow in its wake, even if it owed so much to Animal House and Lemon Popsicle — the next film was in production quickly. Directed and co-written by Bob Clark, who worked with Alan Ormsby and Roger Swaybill, the results may not live up to the original, but it’s way better than the teen sex comedies that would arise after the first movie.

It also made much less than the first movie, but when you’re bringing $33-50 million, depending on source, from a $7 million budget, you can consider this a financial if not artistic success.

So why would Clark come back and make this? Because the producers didn’t want to make A Christmas Story. If Clark made this, he could make that movie, so things worked out pretty well.

The sequel gets its start with “Pee Wee” Morris (Dan Monahan, who is also in Joe D’Amato’s Paradisio Blu) bragging about losing his virginity. Yet that won’t stop his friends Tommy Turner (Wyatt Knight), Billy McCarty (Mark Herrier), Tim Cavanaugh (Cyril O’Reilly), Brian McCarty (Scott Colomby) and Anthony “Meat” Tuperello (Tony Ganios) from pranking him at every opportunity. They’re also part of the Angel Beach High School Drama Club, which is in danger of being canceled before they can produce their Shakespeare Festival thanks to religious leader Bubba Flavel, his “Righteous Flock” which includes Balbricker (Nancy Parsons) and the Klan, who are all upset that the actor playing Romeo — John Henry (Joseph Runningfox), a Native American — will be kissing the white Juliet — played by Wendy Williams (Kaki Hunter, who was also an architect and left acting to teach white water rafting, which is a shame, because she’s really good in this).

I know that these movies are looked down upon as low culture, but the scene where Graveyard Gloria acts dead after Pee Wee touches her, leading to him being chased as a grave robber, man — I confess I couldn’t stop laughing.

Porky may not be in this, but it tries to increase the social commentary — well, from nothing to something — and I love sequels that begin the very next day. Horror fans should look for Richard Liberty (Dr. Logan from Day of the Dead) as Commissioner Couch, Art Hindle (Black Christmas) as Officer Ted Jarvis, William Kerwin (Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!) as Boa Man and a brief cameo by Seth Sklarey, who was Orville in Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. Even better, the love scene between Pee Wee and Wendy has music from Curtains in it.

Lovers of Clark’s movies will enjoy the appearance of another mannequin leg, this time used in a comedic sword fight instead of as lighting.

You can watch this on Tubi.