Ben (Rob Morrow) and Jack (Johnny Depp) cannot believe their luck, spending a few days at this private resort where they can ogle the ladies and sun themselves in the clement weather. They're both looking to score, but this may prove more difficult than they expected: for example, Jack tries to offer a towel to a bathing beauty emerging from the pool only for her to ignore him and a pensioner to accept the offer instead. Meanwhile, Ben bumps into a waitress, Patti (Emily Longstreth) but is immediately smitten - though is it the done thing to date the waitress?
There were so many North American sex comedies made in the nineteen-eighties that it's difficult to keep track of them all, should you be so inclined, but Private Resort was easy to remember. That was because of a certain star you'll have noticed in the cast list: that's right, Emily Longstreth, whose blockbuster The Big Picture was massive all over the globe and, er, no, wait a sec, it was Johnny Depp who attracted interest from those fans in the future curious to see him in an early role. Actually, this was the film he made after his debut in A Nightmare on Elm Street, moving up the credits but not exactly up the quality scale.
Another point of interest for those Depp fans was that he showed up naked here, not for the whole movie, obviously, it wasn't a nudist camp they were at, but enough to allow those intrigued a lingering look at him in the altogether. Director George Bowers, who was actually a respected editor who dabbled in largely lowbrow comedy, was on this evidence seeking to create an equal opportunity sexploitation opus so the male leads doffed their togs as well as the female supporting characters. Not that this was wall to wall starkers actors, as Bowers and his screenwriter, veteran TV man Gordon Mitchell (not the leathery star of yesteryear) aimed to make you laugh as welll.
So if aficionados of TV's Northern Exposure were catered for with a nude Dr Fleischman (in his debut), then followers of the Police Academy franchise got to enjoy Leslie Easterbrook in a sheer nightie with nothing underneath, but it appeared to be the slapstick which most concerned us there, all played out to an alarming amount of tunes on the soundtrack where the lyrics did not seem to have been written yet, hence a lot of "la la la!" and so forth. Not five minutes went by without someone falling over, or if they were outside, tumbling into the pool, though there was a plot of sorts to tie this all together, albeit loosely. That had to do with Ben romancing Patti, but a criminal element emerged after a while to offer some excitement.
Hector Elizondo was the main villain, essaying the role of The Maestro, the presumably ironically-titled jewel thief out to liberate a necklace from an elderly resident of the resort (Dody Goodman). Being a bald man in real life, he was required to wear a wig so he could get into a comic setpeice where Ben is mistaken for a barber and ruins his crowning glory - that was about the level of humour aspired to here, so the right people were rewarded by the end and the wrong people received their well-deserved punishment. That this involved a machine gun was perhaps not the way such comparable efforts as Porky's might have gone, or indeed many of its fellows, but it was mildly amusing to see Andrew Dice Clay as a boorish holidaymaker get his comeuppance, for example, even if you would have to be very easily pleased to be laughing all the way through. Let's face it, it was only the Depp factor which provided much attraction to the contemporary movie watcher.
