Porky’s Revenge (1985)

The first thing to note about Porky’s Revenge is the age of the supposed teenagers in the lead.  They’re all about to graduate from Angel Beach High but it is clear that the actors are all approaching 30.  I noted the crow’s feet, the receding hairlines and the body curvature that isn’t present in the adolescent body.  They also seem to move a little slower.

The second thing to note is that all of this comes to mind during Porky’s Revenge only because there wasn’t much else to focus on.  This is a dreary, boring, slow-paced comedy in which you don’t laugh, you don’t even smile.  You just sit there as stuff happens on the screen.  It illustrates my initial problem with the first movie, that being that the practical jokes were foretold long before the big reveal.  Here the practical jokes are not only telegraphed in advance but the big reveal takes eons to get around to.  It’s like waiting half an hour for a punchline that you already know.

The accent here pulls the series back to raunchy sex games after the second movie stumbled at trying to infuse this brainless material with a social justice plot.  That’s all gone, and now we get the gang from Angel Beach on the edge of graduation trying to save their buddy Meat Turrucco from the hands of a sadistic teacher who wants to fail him and thereby excise him from the basketball team.  He’s the star player, you see.

Meanwhile, they get in hot water with Porky whose brothel they destroyed in the original film, now running an illegal casino on a riverboat.  Seems that the basketball coach is in hot water with Porky and to pay it off, the boys agree to get the coach to throw the game thereby letting Porky get rich by betting against the team.

I’m killing time explaining this to you as an illustration of the way that the movie kills time moving through it’s various plot threads.  None of it is interesting and certainly none of it is funny.  Things move at a snail’s pace and what is suppose to be funny is, I guess, in the concept.  Nothing is established, it is only seen and then happens.  Such as it is, a subplot drops in that the boy’s old rival Coach Ballbricker ends up at a motel where she hopes to have sexual congress with her high school sweetheart that she hasn’t seen in 20 years.  The cruelty of this scene is unbearable as the guys send one of their friends who thinks that he is meeting up with a sexy foreign exchange student.  The kid and the coach end up rolling in bed together until the ruse is revealed and she ends up chasing him naked across the parking lot.

Naturally, we aren’t supposed to feel sympathy for Ballbricker, but that scene is unbearably mean-spirited.  She hasn’t done anything in this movie to deserve such treatment and the scene feels uncomfortable as a result.  So too does the whole movie.  It doesn’t have a through-line.  It just seems to be going through the motions.  Stuff is happening on the screen but you’re not laughing at any of it.  You’re not responding to any of it.  It happens and then you leave.