 |
| Images courtesy of Unearthed Films |
Years before accomplished and renowned sound editor James
Beshears made his name for work on everything from The Fugitive to True
Lies, he had his name on screenplay for the Neil Young directed Human
Highway and today’s forgotten teen-sex “comedy” film Homework starring
Joan Collins or for most of the rest of the filmgoing public a comedy about a
mother who seduces her daughter’s boyfriend.
Unlike the Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn and Dennis Hopper co-starring
cult favorite, Homework became the subject of a lawsuit from four of the
film’s co-stars including Joan Collins claiming the advertising was misleading
and capitalized on a nude scene created in post-production with a body double
to garner some extra attention from her then-hit TV show Dynasty.
Meanwhile the other actors also felt misled by the kind of
film they ultimately ended up making as Collins won part of her suit against
Jensen Farley Pictures to block further advertisements banking on a nude image
of Collins. Between the film’s already
rank status as a grimy regional sexploitation ‘laugh riot’ compounded with the
legal action taken against it by its key performers, factors like these can
only attract boutique releasing labels like Unearthed Films to give it a deluxe
release on their Classics brand not wholly unlike flies gathering around fecal
matter. It isn’t good but for fans
fascinated by this strange post-apocalyptic era of films made in the wake of National
Lampoon’s Animal House and there are oh so many, it makes absolute sense
why this understandably controversial near-statutory little cockroach of a
movie should get a spotlight on it.
Tommy (Michael Morgan) is a young wannabe “rock star” in high
school, longing to lose his virginity amid hastily forming a garage band his friend
and several of his classmates including a choir singer, a skateboarding blonde
and failed attempts to get a renowned coked up horny rock singer named Reddog
into their group. Meanwhile his girlfriend
Sheila (Erin Donovan) is obsessed with becoming a top swimming champion well
past the point of insanity, leaving enough time for her mother Diane (Joan
Collins) bored with her husband (whom we never see onscreen with her) to start
making moves on her daughter’s beau.
There’s a subplot involving Tommy’s therapist where he talks about his
sexual fantasies involving becoming a rock star with groupies literally
disrobing on stage with him as he's performing and a young female substitute
teacher who invites male students to her home for tutoring when she isn’t
fending off catcalls in the classroom.
Oh and there’s a lot of random nudity with close-ups of bare breasts and
horny teens looking into the girl’s locker rooms Porky’s style.
Another one of those horny sexed up teen “comedies” which
not unlike slasher horror films are more interested in getting the young actors
to Larry Clark themselves before the cameras except this one goes as far as to
sneak in a double through tricky re-editing to make it look as if Joan Collins
is getting nude and into it with her underage costar, Homework in spite
of a startlingly realistic coda is pretty dire.
With most of these sorts of regional comedies ala Pinball Summer or
The Party Animal they’re never really all that funny or have characters
resembling real human beings onscreen and many of the sexual or nude antics are
the kind you only really ever see in movies like these and nowhere else. And there’s the laundry list of needle drops
no one has heard of but sound a lot like the real ones in bigger budgeted
movies that can afford to pay off rights issues.
Visually the film looks pretty grimy mostly due to the
transfer which looks to be from a worn theatrical print though incredibly the
film’s cinematographer Paul Goldsmith climbed up in the film world going on to
do several episodes of Max Headroom as well as the award-winning
Muhammad Ali documentary When We Were Kings. For a movie about a group of high school kids
trying to form a garage band for their school talent show, the music from the
original score by Tony Jones and Jim Witzel is puny and average. The young cast does what they can with the
piece though reading about what went on with the actors taking on the producers
and filmmakers in the legal room over this movie is far more entertaining than
anything going on within its mercifully short running time.
Fans who eat these regional teen sexploitation drive-in “comedies”
will be salivating with baited-breath over this Unearthed Classics release
replete with a slipcover, newly conducted interview with producer Max Rosenberg
and promotional poster art. The rest of
us, while eager for more Unearthed fare scraped from beneath a rock locked in
the ocean floor, will be exasperatedly bored with this misbegotten stillborn
dud. Bless Unearthed Films and MVD
Entertainment for bringing this foul turd to the surface. The disc release is good and the film
technically is a fascinating chapter of actors barking back at their own work
in a cinema historical sense. But as a
movie it is a real chore to get through.
Consider yourself warned.
--Andrew Kotwicki
