H.O.T.S.

"H.O.T.S." is an unashamedly exploitative sex comedy flick that followed hot on the heels of "National Lampoon's Animal House", a box-office smash in the late '70s. It was also possibly inspired by all those "Swinging Cheerleaders" movies, which were basically pornographic. It was scripted, surprisingly, by two women.

The plot concerns a group of girls who are blackballed from a snooty sorority, and thus decide to start their own, named "H.O.T.S." after the first initial of each girl. They decide to use their feminine attributes to steal the boyfriends on the rival sorority. Perhaps its most famous scenes are publicity stunts the H.O.T.S. girls pull: a topless parachute jump and a game of strip football.

Of course there is a bizarre subplot about hired goons doing god-knows-what. I wasn't really able to follow these scenes. One of them involves a bear in the swimming pool. The girls also get a seal on a chain somehow, and claim that the name of their sorority stands for "Help Out the Seals".

The girls have a jock strap raid at a frat house, which features a lot of young men wandering around semi naked.

One of the H.O.T.S. girls is kidnapped and bound and gagged. They shave her hair off.

Some random guy appears to have a skull shaped like a cone? I didn't understand that part. It's a bizarre sight.

There is also an ugly fat girl in the movie, and I'm not sure what she was there for.

The movie "climaxes" in the aforementioned strip-football game. The girls play in bikinis, and take their tops off eventually. The movie completely fails to build suspense for this supposedly climactic moment, and films the game ineptly - but who cares about that, right? You want nudity. You get it... sort of. The movie's inept direction doesn't take advantage of so many topless girls by giving you a good look. In fact, the whole movie is a bit like that. The nudity seems incidental, whereas to the people watching the movie, it's anything but - it's the whole reason you watched it in the first place.

You know, I really have a problem with movie lists. I was reading Maxim magazine a while ago and they had a list of the 50 Greatest B-Movies of all time, and knowing me, I of course have to go through and watch them all and write reviews of all of them. This is why you see reviews of movies like Gator Bait and Barb Wire and Coffy on my list. So I noticed H.O.T.S. at the video store the other day and recognized it from Maxim's list of the 50 greatest B-movies, and I decided to rent it and check it out. My only consolation is that I rented it because I recognized it from a list of B-movies, so I already knew it was going to suck.

Given the type of movie that it is, I can't say that H.O.T.S. is a total failure, since it is nothing more than a late 70s T&A film, and it never pretends to by anything else. The only place where it strays widely from its objective is in a ragged subplot involving a couple of ex-cons who have stashed a lot of stolen money in the house that the self-named H.O.T.S. move in to, because this subplot has absolutely no place in the movie. Despite the fact that the rest of the movie is as well, this subplot is completely superfluous and unnecessary.

The story is based on a couple of rival sororities at the beloved F.U., which exists as one of those Universities that contains a grand total of one sorority until the rejects form their own in order to get back at the snobs in the other one. This new sorority, Help Out The Seals (H.O.T.S.), is a sorority supposedly based on helping seals (the seal subplot is another one that doesn't really belong in the movie, and little attention is paid to the meaning of that name beyond having a seal running around here and there throughout the movie).

This is going to sound weird, but there was actually one scene that I was pretty impressed with in this movie. One SHOT that I was impressed with, I should say. About midway through the movie, one of the girls in Pi, the rival sorority, is pouring alcohol into the punch, and she pours some for herself in a glass and drinks it. Oddly enough, what she does as she drinks that alcohol reminds me of something that Charlie Chaplin would do, which really brightened up the movie. Obviously, nothing in this movie comes close to anything that Chaplin ever did, but that shot alone raised my score for the movie from a 2 to a 4.

As a whole, however, the movie is exactly what you would expect it to be, a lot of people running around looking for excuses to take off their clothes (I liked how the remove-one-piece-of-clothing-for-every-score in the football game at the end was one of the GIRLS' ideas. Riiiiiiiiight…), and not much thought is put into much of anything else. There is, for example, a scene early in the film when a couple of the Pi girls pour hot sauce into the refreshments at a H.O.T.S. party, accidentally getting caught in an incriminating photograph (the girl taking the picture didn't realize that she photographed them at the time), although the photograph never comes up for any reason later in the film.

I've seen movies like this before, it's kind of like Gator Bait but without the violence and the rednecks and Coffy wasn't far off. Even Barb Wire is much the same, just with a bigger budget and more silicon. Thankfully, Maxim's 50 B-movie list contains only a few more comedies, because while these cheesy teen T&A films are entertaining every once in a while as bad movies with the occasional semi-nude scene, after watching H.O.T.S. I think I've decided that I like the bad horror movies better than the bad comedies. I'd rather watch a lot of terrible actors pretend to be scared than pretend to be funny.

I saw this several years ago on the Playboy channel. It featured a few Playmates (Kiger & Bryant--an Indianapolis native), a future T.V. sidekick of Mike Hammer (Bloom) and a has-been child star (Bonaduce) all frolicking in the highjinks of college.

Throw in a Hattie McDaniel/Lillian Randolph type maid for comedy relief, lots of boobies and some strip football and you have all the makings of a classic drive-in movie. H.O.T.S. was made after the success of National Lampoon's Animal House, and in some ways was better--more or less because of the girlies. While the plots not memorable (poor girls getting even with rich vixens) it does have its classic moments like the pie fight from a hot-air balloon, nude skydiving--performed wonderfully by the late Angela Aames, the real life bear scenes and the strip football game.

Not a movie to watch with your wife/girlfriend/concubine/lover, but instead one to watch with a buddy or several guys over a six-pack, pizza and snacks.

While anyone who claims to have watched this movie simply for the Danny Bonaduce shots is clearly in denial of their libido, it is indeed a fine performance, meaning pleasurably hideous.

Danny is some kind of semi-famous celebrity MC here in the movie, which makes you wonder if he wasnt playing himself in this role, so to speak. The shining moment of this movie, outside of the nude scenes, is when Danny gets onstage with his band to sing a song called "Shake it Baby," a song which really has no other words than those. And who can ever forget the scene in which Danny Bonaduce (Richie) finds himself in bed with a live seal and enjoying the action? God knows I have tried to forget, but it is stained on my retina.

There are lots and lots and lots of flopping, nude women in this movie, which serves its purpose rather well I guess. However, when you are done looking at the girls, some scenes to watch out for are: robot maid enters sorority house to find the secret cache of stolen money, extra large nude woman saves the day in a hot air balloon, and perhaps the strangest -- girls make hundreds of dollars selling "pies" consisting only of whip cream on a plate with glued-on nude sorority girl pictures.

If for nothing else, apart from the Bonaduce madness and the kooky bumbling crooks, you have to see this movie to observe the unmeasurable extremes filmmakers will go to in trying to justify what is patently gratuitous nudity. Strip football?

Mix old-time Burlesque, "jiggle" TV and the basic plot of "Animal House", and you've pretty much summed up this example of "B" movies at the time Reagan became President. Of all the "Animal House" imitators, "H.O.T.S." is probably the best. Don't watch it for great acting, writing or directing, but don't expect to spend a lot of time with your finger on the "Fast Forward" button either. If all you've seen is the USA edit, you've missed what is the essence of the film - beautiful topless women. It's not so much sexploitation as it is an update of the kind of show Grandpa saw in the big city when Grandma wasn't along. Not only the light, breezy attitude toward nudity, but the jokes, the pies, the seltzer, the animal acts - even two baggy-pants comics.