Screwballs (1983)

How many sexual double entendres (verbal and visual) are in this cheerfully trashy high school comedy? I count 5,212,341,123, but I might have missed a few in the bowling scene. Our heroes here are five horny guys who’ve all ended up in detention thanks to the treachery of the subtly named Purity Busch. She’s the most stuck-up tease in school, an ice queen in a tight sweater. Her two favorite things to do are get boys in trouble and never, ever, ever peel off that sweater. Our heroes’ mission: Get Purity’s top off. They know it’s impossible to charm her out of it, so they resort to a series of wild Batman villain-style schemes, such as hypnotism, dressing in drag, and flat-out breaking into her house.

It’s a low-budget charmer, filthy and funny and full of cute girls. Roger Corman’s New World Pictures produced this to ride the coattails of Porky’s. The whole film feels like it’s stuck between two worlds, to oddball effect. Like Porky’s, this is set in the late 50s/early 60s, but you can just barely tell. It still feels like 1983. Stuffing all the girls into old-fashioned big white brassieres is about as deep as the period detail gets. Also, Polish director Rafal Zielinski—a guy with art film aspirations who was paying his dues making teen sex romps for Corman—was educated in hoity-toity British private schools and knew nothing about American high schools so he just made everything as cartoon-ish as possible.

Aside from Purity Busch (Linda Speciale), the most memorable girl in the movie is the vivacious Bootsy Goodhead, played by Linda Shayne. In addition to giving us a great topless moment and stealing every scene she’s in with a fetching smile and an intangibly kinky disposition, she also co-wrote the screenplay with exploitation-meister Jim Wynorski.