Porky’s II: The Next Day (1983)

Critics have justifiably taken the original Porky’s apart for its hateful and abusive attitude toward women.  I oughta know, I’ve been one of them.  I complained that the film had an attitude toward sex that was disturbing, that sex was not approached with a sense of joy or passion, but with a ill-feeling of hostility.

Things haven’t changed in Porky’s II: The Next Day at which the song remains the same, but I got the sense that the filmmakers perhaps were answering the complaints about the first film because this time the gang at Angel Beach High School drag in practical jokes aimed at easy targets: crooked politicians, money-grubbing evangelists, establishment lame-o’s and the Ku Klux Klan.  You see, they want to make sure that the targets this time are something that everybody hates in order to distract from the fact that the guys still view women as portals.

Oh, and they also want to get you on their side with another easy target: having all of the adults be in opposition to the annual Shakespeare Festival.  So, the heroes of this movie hate racists, preachers, city officials are now attacking the arts.  And yet, Pee Wee still says of one his female classmates “the girl’s my slave.”  That’s two steps forward and about ten steps back.

What’s worse is that the enemies of this movie are painted as easy, cartoonish fools.  The challenge in taking these people down is in attacking their twisted agendas and their moral repugnancy.  It is not so easy when the person sounds reasonable and intellectually sound which, if you listen to those people on television, is generally how they sound.  These people look and sound like they came off the set of Hee Haw.

But even aside from that, I generally got bored with this movie.  Everyone is of equal repugnancy, whether we are supposed to be on their side or not.  There is a general scumminess to this movie that feels unsettling.  I’m all for a movie that gets down and dirty but I just wanted to get away from this movie pretty fast.