Oddballs

(Miklos Lente, 1984)
This movie is terrible. Terrible! But I love it. Without the slightest self-consciousness, the film's approach to the summer sex comedy is so appallingly wrong and stupid that it acts as a kind of corrective. Situating the usual hormonal overkill among a cast dominated by pre-pubescent boys, it treats us to an absolutely incoherent onslaught of bad puns, desperate slapstick and cringing smut, not so much humorous as laughable, and yet the careening, train-wreck illogic of the plotting is of a piece with an unbridled vulgarity that borders on surrealism. The defining comic device consists of unrelenting cartoon-style sound effects, frantically double-underlining every attempt at humour and making matters worse almost without fail. Mike MacDonald's perilous, smirking overkill becomes tolerable when balanced by Milan Cheylov's bounding idiocy and especially Foster Brooks' pathetic drunk landowner. His climactic moral awakening is as moronic as everything else here, and that's a good thing: no moist grandstanding to compromise the simple-minded exploitation. Sometimes unbridled, opportunistic greed bears such dumb gifts as this, and I for one am quite happy to enjoy the sideshow.