Last American Virgin, The (1982)

Can a weak final act sink an otherwise terrific film? I pondered this question after my viewing of “The Last American Virgin.” After some thought, I came to the conclusion that no, a weak final act can’t sink a great film. It may hold it back from its full potential, but it won’t tarnish the journey toward the breaking point.

“The Last American Virgin” is a raunchy teen sex comedy in the tradition of “Porky’s.” What sets it apart from that film is its frank honesty. While “Porky’s” may be a funnier film, it’s not as poignant and in touch with the teenage spirit. It’s more a fantasy built from real parts than a pure representation of its subject matter. “The Last American Virgin” is the opposite: an honest look into the lives of teenagers in love and lust with fantastical scenarios sprinkled in throughout.

The film follows the travails of three friends: Gary (Lawrence Monoson), David (Joe Rubbo), and Rick (Steve Antin). The three are at that dangerous crossroads of life, where raging hormones and bad decisions collide. All three long for sex, with Rick the only truly successful one. He’s rugged, good-looking, and a ladies man at heart. David may be overweight, but that never plays into his predicament. He’s rather confident in himself, which wins over the hearts of some, but his anxiety gets the better of him in certain situations. And then there’s Gary, the main protagonist of the film. He’s the prototypical nice guy; the friend who will loan Rick the keys to his grandmother’s house so he can get laid. He too lets his anxiety get in the way, but for a different reason.

Gary wants love. He doesn’t know it until he meets Karen (Diane Franklin), the new girl in school. It’s love at first sight, which only exists in movies and with teenagers. I’m guilty of believing in it and I’m sure you are too. I’m sure you’re also guilty of concocting a plan in which to talk to your newfound crush, one much more complicated than simply saying hello. Gary pops the tires on Karen’s bike and conveniently drives by in his pizza delivery van to give her a lift to school. It’s cheesy, innocent, and completely true of the teenage persuasion.

Wouldn’t you know it, Karen falls for Rick instead. And thus begins Gary’s descent into self-loathing. Opportunities arise for him to lose his virginity, his initial goal in life, but he rejects them because they’re not Karen. He doesn’t quite know this is why, as he still tries valiantly to have sex. Karen’s friend, Rose (Kimmy Robertson), shows interest in him, but he rejects her initially. He only accepts her due to lust, and even then he struggles to go all the way. He almost loses it to a promiscuous older woman he delivers pizza to, but he lets both Rick and Gary get an opportunity. When his time arrives, her squeeze comes home to cock-block him. Subconsciously, he cock-blocked himself as he voluntarily lets his friends go first. Then there’s the prostitute, who he does actually lose his virginity to, but it goes so quick and is incredibly awkward that it’s unfair to truly count it. He does contract crabs, though, which is shoehorned in for some cheap gags, but they all elicit laughter, so it’s all good.

The title actually refers to Karen and not Gary, as Rick’s conquest is to be with whom he views as the last American virgin. Metaphorically, it refers to every teenager going through puberty, most specifically the males. Both genders long for sex; it’s only natural. Women want it to be special and rightfully so. Most men, however, view it as a burden. A burning desire that weighs them down. They hear of their friends and classmates losing their virginities and feel left out. They don’t care how they get it, just that they get it.

Truth be told, most men lie about losing their virginities. While some do in fact lose it in loveless fashion, most still pine for their first time to be special, even if they don’t know it. That’s what makes Gary so endearing and this film so honest. Writer/director Boaz Davidson observes teenage lust and puppy love from an adult perspective. He’s looking back on his own self and coming to realize what directed him. He’s smart enough to not allow Gary to realize why and even allows him to have his heart broken.

Then comes the final act. It goes against the honesty and innocent tone of the film, despite Davidson’s best intentions. I won’t reveal the twist that the film crumbles underneath, but I will state that it’s reminiscent of an after-school special. It’s of a real situation certain teenagers face, but isn’t handled seriously. Peppy hits from the time still croon over the soundtrack and a cheeky montage contains an otherwise heartbreaking scenario. To call it sickening would be wrong, as it’s not meant to be. Davidson is truly approaching it with heart, but it isn’t befitting of the situation. It almost sinks the film. Almost.

The actual final shot of the film, which has also drawn the ire of many, is actually quite good. If it weren’t for the after-school special that preceded it, I’d go so far to call it excellent. It’s depressingly honest and, while a complete one-eighty of the film’s tone, complements the story. It just doesn’t resonate as much as it should because the final act as a whole doesn’t complement the story.

It’d be wrong of me to say “The Last American Virgin” was tanked because of its final act because it most certainly wasn’t. Three-fourths of the film is clever, charming, and very funny! Davidson is able to incorporate the standard sex romp humor in with his ingenuous direction. A scene in which the three friends substitute Sweet’n Low in for cocaine to please potential partners is in line with raunchy comedies, but truthful in how the teenage mind thinks. It’s both funny and genuine, which is what most of the film is built upon.

MVT: Boaz Davidson. His script and direction, outside of the final act, is as intelligent as the film is raunchy. He’s not content with churning out a simple teenage sex romp, but determined to showcase the innocence and reality of it all. He may get in over his head, but his intentions are in the right place.

Make or Break: I can’t quite pinpoint what made the film, as it’s the combination of sequences that reflect the true beauty of the film. If I had to choose, it’d be when Gary first discovers that Karen is with Rick, as it sets in motion the true moral of the story: sex is better when in love and love is what most truly desire.

Final Score: 8.5/10

Gas Pump Girls (1979)

June (Kirsten Baker) and her friends at Hometown High have just graduated, and look forward to spending one last summer hanging out with each other.  But when her Uncle Joe’s (Huntz Hall) gas station is ready to go out of business from a combination of Joe’s failing health and fierce competition from the more upscale Pyramid gas station directly across the street, June connives her buddies into pitching in and bringing the dingy, old gas station back to life.  Through the miracle of erections.

Joel Bender’s Gas Pump Girls (aka The Mechanic Girls) is a fairly typical teen sex romp that plays fast and loose enough with the standards of the genre to be slightly refreshing.  The girls, with the exception of one (January, played by Rikki Marin), are distinguished from one another.  There’s Plain Jane (Leslie King), the wallflower who barely speaks at all.  There’s April (Sandy Johnson), the sexual (but eager) innocent.  There’s Betty (Linda Lawrence) the busty, high maintenance brunette who knows all about manipulating men’s lechery to satisfy her material desires.  And, of course, there’s June, the energetic go-getter with a purpose.  

Their boyfriends (or boy toys, if you want), by contrast, are largely forgettable dullards who only prove Betty’s theories true (but, let’s face it, every guy in this movie does).  June’s beau Roger (Dennis Bowen) is the isolated case, as he genuinely wants to spend time with June, and is upset that he may never see her again after summer’s end.  The third group in this triangle are the local biker “gang” The Vultures, led by the Fonzarelli-lite Butch (Steve Bond).  The Vultures make Eric von Zipper’s Rat Pack look like The Satans.  They are juvenile delinquents only in the sense that they think they’re juvenile delinquents.  They don’t do much more than a little loitering, but this fits with the film’s breezy attitude.  

The other way that Gas Pump Girls stands out from others of its ilk is in the portrayal of its main theme.  Primarily, this is an underdog/save the rec center plot, but instead of a bunch of teens confronting some greedy land developer, here the conflict is with the esurient gas station owner across the way, Mr. Friendly (Dave Shelley).  It’s a socioeconomic struggle between a united working class and a soulless corporation, and we know it’s essentially soulless (outside of the mere fact that it’s a corporation in a movie) because they are homogenized and gentrified, as opposed to the creative, all-inclusive workers of Joe’s Super Duper.  The Pyramid goons conform to the standards of what’s expected of a gas station in generic terms, but Joe’s Super Duper provides an individualized, exciting gas-pumping experience (there’s even an extensive double entendre about the process [“Grab it, stick it in, squeeze it, and let it peter out”]).  Joe’s Super Duper is the new blood in the local gas pumping industry.  They are the rebirth of a dead business from out of the ashes, fueled (ahem) by youthful enthusiasm.  Why more full service (ahem, again) gas stations didn’t follow this film’s business model in real life, like bikini car washes, is beyond me.

Yet, even the film’s antagonists comply with the movie’s jaunty disposition.  Friendly mocks the girls, but aside from sending useless thugs Bruno and Moiv (Joe E. Ross and Mike Mazurki, respectively, and please note the ethnic spelling of Marv, just so you get the full picture) to intimidate June, things never get too personal for the upscale station owner.  Friendly is easily thwarted, even when he ups his game and gets the gas supply cut off to Joe’s pumps.  Further than this, when the youngsters go straight to Pyramid corporate headquarters (disguised as Arabs and belly dancers, naturally), the expectation is that corporate fat cat Mr. Smin (Jack Jozefson) will be even more heartless and venal than Friendly.  However, he’s one of the biggest pushovers for a sob story ever, and the whole thing is executed so as not to get in the way of the fun.

Another aspect of the film that I found intriguing is the notion of childhood’s end.  At the high school commencement, a practical joke by The Vultures leads to our female leads baring their boobs for all the audience to see.  The girls are all technically adults now, and though embarrassed at first, they are pretty hunky dory about it in the next scene in the same sense of discovering the joys of drinking alcohol and then discovering the joys of drinking alcohol legally in a bar.  As previously stated, Roger takes the inevitable departure of June from his life pretty hard.  He goes from playful flirting to stunned contemplation, though June seems okay with it all until she gets the phone call regarding her uncle’s health which perhaps reminds June of the transitory nature of life.  That said, June also gets a little song to sing to herself while hanging out at her uncle’s closed gas station which belies her original nonchalance (curiously, the only song any character in the film sings, and it made me suspect this was actually a musical; it isn’t).  Its title is All Of My Friends, and it includes the lines, “Just gimme all of my friends, and I’ll be happy again,” “bring ‘em back home, where you know they belong,” and most importantly, “I’m lonely.”  It’s half-lament, half-retrouvaille for long held friendships that are slowly dispersing.  The kids’ entire business escapade is a final fling for them to both solidify and begin letting go of their relationships.  Even The Vultures’ sudden sense of community spirit appears to stem from their connection to these teens specifically and their realization that soon they won’t be around to prank and harass (plus, the age divide between them and active high school kids is only widening, so these may be the last high school kids with which they can partake in their particular brand of mischief without just being creepy).  The film, then, is a last hurrah for youth, as well as being a call to seize the opportunity to do something, have some fun, and maybe use your body to sell some petroleum products.  And that’s the big take away; the film is an ultra-casual ode to youth.  As a dyed in the wool nostalgist, it works in spades for me.  For as much as the film is a snapshot of the West Coast in the late Seventies (something I never tire of seeing), its message applies to youth (American and otherwise) on the whole: Grab it, stick it in, squeeze it, and let it peter out.

MVT:  The film’s innocent joie de vivre joined with its slightly melancholic undercurrent.  

Make or Break:  The locker room scene, wherein the girls talk about how they feel about what happened and how they view the world.

Score:  6.75/10

Airborne (1993)

I have never rollerbladed.  By the time it caught on and became yet another “Extreme Sport” (or “X-Treme” for the marketing savvy), I was well and fully over it.  I did, however, rollerskate on occasion back in the day (cue the theme to The Andy Griffith Show).  And like most things in my youth that I took joy in, I did it in the most low-rent, Army Pete, hand-me-down sort of way imaginable.  My first pair of rollerskates (nay, my only pair) were these hideous white leather numbers with red accents.  They were maybe a step up from the metal slabs with wheels that you could just strap onto the bottom of your sneakers.  What made them even more exceptionally crappy were the tiny clay wheels.  They looked like they were made out of very old rocks (possible from Stonehenge), and they were as noisy as the proverbial dump truck rolling through a nitroglycerin plant (thank you, Uncle Lewis).  They were the kind of wheels that if you hit anything thicker than a leaf, you stopped dead and went ass over chisel onto the very unforgiving ground.  There was also no way to stop on the skates, so you either grabbed onto the nearest solid object (usually a nice, rusty fence) or ran into the nearest patch of grass (which again would send you ass over chisel onto the very unforgiving ground).  I don’t recall if I ever wore them to the local skate rink, Skate Odyssey, but I want to say I probably did.  After all, there was no way I could afford skate rentals, and the rink wouldn’t have larger skates for a kid like me with extraordinarily wide, fat feet (which I still have and the shitty arches to go with them).  Yes, dear reader, I most likely rode around Skate Odyssey, jamming to Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend,” wearing a pair of rollerskates that would have sent Jim Bray into fits of apoplexy.  And I did it with my head held high (or at the absolute minimum, not hung in shame).  Stick that in your pipe, Mitchell Goosen (Shane McDermott)! 

The aforementioned Mitchell (whom, bizarrely, no one ever refers to as “Goose”) just loves blading from his house to the beach and catching some tasty waves every single day of his lazy life.  However, when his parents (Louan Gideon and Jim Jansen) get a grant to do a zoological study in Australia, Mitch finds himself shunted off to Cincinnati, Ohio with Aunt Irene (Edie McClurg) and Uncle Louis (Patrick O’Brien).  Teaming up with oddball cousin Wiley (Seth Green), Mitchell soon discovers that his laidback attitude may be a bit much in the landlocked states of the Union.

The very first thing that should strike you about Rob Bowman’s Airborne is its heavy reliance on fantasies.  What’s a little more interesting is in how we are introduced to this motif.  When Mitchell goes to his first class at his new school, he catches the eye of Jack’s (Chris Conrad) girlfriend Debbie (Katrina Fiebig).  This is immediately followed by Jack grabbing Mitchell and throwing him through a window.  But, of course, our very next cut is of Jack, fuming but seated, this shot matching the one which preceded his outburst.  Mere moments later, Debbie fantasizes about Mitchell with his shirt off, sunlight beaming down over him.  The first two fantasies in the film don’t belong to our protagonist, yet they go a long way in grounding the approach to the story and the world that Mitchell has entered.  These are teens, and teens have very strong, very immediate urges.  It’s also a great shorthand to set up some primary character relationships.  It doesn’t really pay off on any of them (which I’ll get to later), but their establishment is solid stuff.  

By contrast, Mitchell constantly fantasizes about the rolling waves he misses so much.  What’s odd here is that, the wave symbolism has no deeper connection to the plot, its on-the-nose explanation from the protagonist being as skin deep as skin deep gets (which would be just skin deep).  In what is perhaps one of the most frustrating dream sequences ever put on film, we see the waves, Mitchell wakes up, and then relates his convoluted dream which we have not been privy to outside of the water imagery.  All of the fantasies in the film are frustrating in similar regard because outside of generating a slight amount of visual stimulation, they have no bearing on the story whatsoever.  In that respect at least, they are fantasies as teens may experience and process them, but from a viewer standpoint, their lack of meaning despite their emphasis throughout renders them superfluous.

I mentioned the stymieing of expectations, and this is the film’s biggest flaw.  We expect the primary conflict in the film to be between Mitchell and Jack with Debbie complicating things with her puppy love for Mitch and Mitch’s puppy love for Nikki (Brittney Powell) growing.  It isn’t.  We expect Mitchell to grudgingly gain the respect of his new peers by teaming up with them to beat the Preps in their beloved sport of hockey, thus learning something about himself and coming to admire his teammates as equals.  He doesn’t.  We expect Mitchell to get taken down a peg and understand that he doesn’t, in fact, have the answer to everything (something McDermott punctuates by constantly ending every sentence with a jaw-clenched rictus) and that there is as much value in the relationships he is forming in Ohio as those he left in California.  He doesn’t, and his obstinate self-righteousness is truly nerve-grinding to put up with, to boot.  In much the same way that the fantasies are essentially meaningless, the conflicts in the story are also meaningless, because the filmmakers don’t seem to care enough about any of them to develop them beyond passing fancies.  

I’m not sure if Bowman and company thought they were being more clever than they actually are in confounding audience assumptions at every turn, but by giving us surrogates to resolve those expectations and then deriving no real sense of progress with these surrogates, instead of providing us with something to champion as a standout work in a cliché genre, we get an admixture which is still enjoyable for the notes it hits but lacking in any resonance outside of its value as a snapshot of the Nineties (and not even a very illuminating snapshot, at that).  The film is still entertaining enough on a strictly surface level, and it could make a decent third feature on a triple bill with Rad and Thrashin’.  But all by its lonesome, it’s a schizophrenic mélange, a highlight reel of a more cohesive movie that may very well only exist in Mitchell Goosen’s fantasies.

MVT:  Bowman’s direction is highly capable, and the film looks great, so I certainly can’t take that away from anyone.  If he had a better script, however…

Make Or Break:  The race down the Devil’s Backbone (read: the entirety of Cincinnati, Ohio) is the standout.  It’s remarkably well-blocked, it’s well-edited by Harry B. Miller III, and the cinematography by Daryn Okada is dynamic and nicely framed, capturing the locations attractively.

Score:  6.75/10