Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987)

I don’t think these are the same characters from the first movie.  They don’t act like those lovable guys who went toe-to-toe with the jocks.  Something is wrong here.  They’re too confident, too loud, too brash.  They’re assertive.  That’s the wrong note for a movie about nerds.  Nerds are awkward, socially inept and use their brains instead of their brawn.

I loved the original Revenge of the Nerds because of their twerpy sensibilities.  They cared about each other and we cared about them.  But here the nerds are obnoxious and I wanted to get away from them.  Sure they’re wearing the accoutrements – the glasses, the pocket protectors – but who are they behind those things?

The story takes Lewis, Booger, Poindexter and the rest of the Tri-Lambs down to Fort Lauderdale where they butt heads again with the Alpha-Betas who reject the TL’s because they aren’t beefcake studs.  When both houses end up in Florida for a convention, the AB’s try to sabotage the Tri-Lambs and get them thrown out of the interfraternity counsel.

Okay, so yeah, this sounds like the plot of every college sex comedy that ever went on spring break – and it is!  What made the first movie special was that it cheerfully embraced how much of a horny sex comedy it was but it kept it at a certain level.  We cared about those guys and what happened to them.  Here it’s just another movie you’ve seen a thousand times before.

What’s worse, I wasn’t laughing.  Actually, I was kind of aggrevated.  Nobody thought this out.  Nobody thought through the characters or what happened to them.  It’s a lot of shenanigans without any real consideration for building a joke.  The filmmakers took a clever title, slapped together the actors from the original and have given us less than nothing.