Losin' It

Losin' It

Giving away your virginity in some sex-pact is ludicrous - especially since you can sell it on the Internet.

Unfortunately, the digital era is decades away in this 1960s set teen sex-comedy.

Hell-bent on popping their cherries, three seniors, Woody (Tom Cruise), Dave (Jackie Earle Haley) and Spider (John Stockwell), head from L.A. to Tijuana in a 1957 Chevy intent on losing their virginity in a Mexican brothel. However, losing it is harder than it seems as the boys are tested at every turn by the corrupt local sheriff, a desperate housewife (Shelley Long) and a bad case of limp dick.

Teeming with tons of testosterone-tinged hijinks involving cross-border prostitutes, fireworks and fabled aphrodisiacs this 1983 romp is a forgotten gem of the juvenile genre that features an exceptionally embarrassing performance from a young Tom Cruise.

Moreover, for a man to lose his virginity, technically, he needs to be penetrated. Yellow Light

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Lay off this movie, people. It's a teen-age sex romp comedy. It doesn't pretend to be anything more. And as for teen sex-romp comedies, it's pretty entertaining.

Tom Cruise is in it. Shelley Long has a good part. And the guy from Breaking Away has the best character of all. What I really liked about this movie was how it "romanticized" Tijuana. It makes you want to take a trip down there and raise some hell yourself.

This movie is a good time on a Friday night. If you're gonna rent a movie like this, rent this one. You won't be disappointed.

This is a really bad movie. The only reason to see it is because it is early Tom Cruise, and of course he is gorgeous. I've been to Tijuana lotsa times, and let me tell you, some 16 years later, it's still a dirty, wicked city. If this movie conveys anything well, it's that.

Losin' It is a pretty funny roadtrip movie, thanks to the comedic antics of Jackie Earle Haley ('Breaking Away') who plays Dave, an oversexed kid desperate from some action during a weekend in Mexico. He and his buddies, Woody (Tom Cruise) clean cut shy kid, headlong Spider (the gorgeous John Stockwell) and Dave's clever brother Wendell (John P. Navin Jr.), embark on a wild roadtrip to lust after girls and underaged booze in 1965.

Each of the guys has their own experiences with love and mischief. Woody spends most of the time with Kathy (Shelly Long), a flamboyant older woman who hitched a ride with the boys to get a quickie divorce. Spider, the ego, abandons the group and frequently gets in trouble with a corrupt sheriff. Wendell, who came along for lots of black market goodies, spends the weekend trying to save his brother's ass, since Dave's misconception that the town is full of easy women gets him in heavy trouble with the locals.

It's a pretty funny movie that I'm surprised hasn't been given more notoriety among 80s fans. Tom Cruise and John Stockwell played their typical characters, but the stars of this movie, were really Jackie Earle Haley and John Navin. They were perfect.

I saw this movie in an entirely appropriate place -- as part of an all-night quadruple feature at a cinema in Northern Ontario, which could have been more accurately described as "Four lousy films for the price of one"! (For the record, the other three films were "Ghoulies", "Missing in Action" and "Ninja III - The Domination").

I would say that Losin' It is probably the best of these four films – not that that's really saying very much. (It was the concluding feature of a very long night of cinematic mediocrity) . It's not an awful film (particularly compared with some of the other components of this multiple feature), and it has the advantage of having been put together by a crew who knew what they were doing. Rather, it's an assembly line teen film of the period, which is given somewhat more polish than usual by the presence of Shelley Long and the up-and-coming Tom Cruise in the cast.

Two years previously in 1981, Porky's established a profitable template for teen films that many producers are still exploiting today. I see Losin' It as a Porky's knock-off, from a similar time and aimed at a similar audience. Essentially, if you were part of that target audience, you would probably have enjoyed it. I was just passing out of the target demographic when I saw this, so perhaps I'm more blasé about it than I might have been if I had seen it a few years earlier. There's a whole genre of teen sex comedy (which tries to tease the audience while dancing around the fact that they can't really show very much) that loses a lot of its impact once you've actually "lost it" yourself.