The Big Bet

This movie is incorrectly considered a "sex comedy", a la Porky's or (the far superior) Private School. It isn't. It's a boring softcore porn film that plays like Hef found a bunch of discarded footage from a few mid-'80s centrefold shoots and decided to structure a movie around them. Indeed, the softcore scenes - all in the "imagination" of the protagonist - take up so much runtime that you forget about the flimsy excuse for a plot.

The plot: the day-dreaming hero makes a bet with a jerk that if he can nail the new girl at school - a Reverend's daughter - he gets the jerk's car. If he fails to get his D wet, the jerk takes his car instead. Of course, as in all movies structured around a bet, there's a time limit on how long the hero gets to "score", but this aspect is completely pointless and arbitrary because the movie has no sense of the passage of time anyway. The point of the whole "you get a week" scenario in movies is to provide tension as the clock ticks and it looks like the hero won't be able to seal the deal. In this movie, you barely even see the antagonist after the bet is made anyway, so you forget about that and watch what looks like the hero going from room to room in his own house and apparently walking in on Playboy shoots, as former Playmates such as Monique Gabrielle do what they do best - make sexy facial expressions and keep still. You could have this much fun with your dad's old nudie mags.

The movie does have one thing going for it, however, and that is Sylvia Kristel. Her scenes with the hero provide the movie's sole source of eroticism. She is the only real actress in the movie. The rest aren't actresses: they're models. And models aren't that interesting when they're still striking poses in a medium that allows them to actually move around.