Hardbodies (1984)

You can see the machinations behind the scenes.  A group of middle-aged movie executives wanted to make a movie featuring girls in bikinis down at the beach.  So, they made their ultimate fantasy, a movie about three middle-aged businessmen who rent an apartment at the beach in order to watch girls in bikinis down on the beach.  It’s all so shallow.

Yes, the girls are beautiful, and occasionally those bikinis come off, unfortunately no one could think of anything else to go on in this movie.  The girls are just as much a middle-point here as they were in Porky’s.  They’re here to be leered at but never made into human beings.  Every time a girl moves close to being an actual character, the filmmakers cut her off or excise her from the movie entirely. 

Instead, the three boring businessmen are given all the focus.  They want to meet girls and so they hire a dimwitted beach bum named Scotty to teach them all his great techniques for picking up girls, like falling down in front of a girl who is roller skating then inviting them to a party where, say, an exec from a modeling agency will be there!  I was shocked when this actually worked.

After a promising opening with lots of girls skating on the pier, playing in the water and laying out on the beach, the movie settled in and I got bored.  The bulk of the movie is the male characters but they’re so dumb and so boring that you wish they’d shut up and get out of the way.  Women in this movie are seen at a distance as lone prizes to be won.  There’s a scene late in the film in which Scotty comforts a blonde who bemoans a life of being called a bimbo, a ding-a-ling and a yo-yo.  That’s the limit of the drama here.