The upfront credit for Direction listing Miss Sharon Mitchell & Billy Dee puts unfortunate pressure on MAKING THE GRADE to deliver, and it doesn't. It's not terrible, like the earlier Judd Nelson film with that name, but it's still a nothing feature,.
Uninviting genre of schoolgirls' sex lives while boning up for exams (pun intended) has a rather poorly chosen lineup of Lynn LeMay (way too mature looking, more likely to be cast as a teacher), opposite Tara Collins and Tabatha Fox, neither of them of star quality.
Sasha Gabor with a very bad grey rinse in his hair plays the kids' professor, while our directorial duo get things off to a very bad start by having the femme trio hanging out with Raven Richards, who emerges (if the viewer can fill in a lot of blanks) as sort of their den mother. I thought at first that she was just an overage student to make a quartet -but she does fill the bill doing her typecast stint as a motherly lesbian (actually switch-hitter, getting a hump scene with Buck Adams as almost a script-afterthought).
Buck, who can be exasperating if the director allows (see him overact miserably in Patti Rhodes' crummy LOTTERY LUST) was apparently sat on heavily by Miss Mitchell & Billy, as he underplays his role of handyman whose dick is always at the ready.
The video's theme has to do with integrity, as the girls quarrel over cheating on their psych exam, ultimately giving in to temptation. The show ends on a morally questionable note, the auteurs evidently assuming that just since it's porn then who cares? Given Mitch's well- known humanitarian philosophy (in an odd way she's the Bono of porn, and I don't mean Sonny), I found this lapse extremely disappointing.
