It's a Monday morning, and the students of Taft and Adams High School, known as T&A for short, are turning up for the day's lessons, although for five male pupils the day will not have a happy ending. Take Rick McKay (Peter Keleghan) for example, an opportunist who notices to his delight that the girls in his year are undergoing a breast examination this morning, so he bluffs his way into the medical room by pretending to be injured and dresses up as a doctor. When the girls arrive, he sets about giving them the examination, but before he can get very far he is found out and ordered to take detention. He won't be the only one...
After Porky's was released, there was a clamour for more sex comedies to cash in, and as that was a Canadian production, for a while that country's cinematic output was not all austere drama but had a fair proportion of lowbrow humour mixed with a young and willing cast losing their clothes for the delight of the viewing masses. The fad for seeing hardcore porn on the big screen was well over, and now the era of North American softcore had survived the seventies and was marching into the eighties as if it would never stop. Well, it did draw to an end for whatever reason - the internet is often pointed to as a culprit, which lends these films the glow of nostalgia.
Curiously, for a film that has the reputation of wall to wall naked ladies, Screwballs is pretty cheeseparing with the nudity; although there is one topless actress in the first five minutes, you have to wait about a half hour for the next one as the plot is put into play. That plot sees the five students sent to detention for such crimes as masturbating in the meat locker or taking a French class in a saucy direction once the teacher is out of the way, and when they are there they hatch a plot to relieve their main source of sexual frustration: that they have never seen the homecoming queen's breasts. That's it, that's all the storyline consists of.
That homecoming queen is the dubiously named Purity Busch (Linda Speciale), who is not set up as a particularly sympathetic character, as after all she teases our heroes and even sends new boy Tim Stevenson (Jim Coburn) blundering into the girl's locker room as a cruel joke. That might not be enough justification for her humiliation in the opinion of most people, but it's all screenwriters Linda Shayne (who also appears) and future director Jim Wynorski come up with, and besides we're meant to be laughing at the tribulations of the quintet of sex-starved boys, whose attempts to see Purity in the altogether are forever thwarted.
Well, almost forever thwarted as there has to be some kind of climax to all of this, and it does end in the way you'd expect, although for some reason the producers (who included an uncredited Roger Corman seeing no chance for making easy cash go unexploited) saw fit to place the end credits in big, yellow letters over what most of the audience will have been waiting to see for the past eighty minutes. Before that point, there are various sketches that have Tim turn up at Purity's house only to be seduced by her mother by mistake, or a game of strip bowling that might not see much in the way of naked flesh, but does feature the nerd character get a bowling ball stuck on an intimate area. Compared to its peers, Screwballs is largely innocuous, and there's something heroic about its determination to pursue the idiotic in the name of comedy. Music by Tim McCauley.
[Severin's Blu-ray and DVD feature interviews with the cast and crew responsible for bringing us this cinematic achievement, along with two experts putting the film in context and an audio commentary.]
