In the 1970s, with the expansion of producer Roger Corman's New World Pictures, Corman set out to establish a cycle of successful films, focusing on nurses. There were the Candy Stripe Nurses, Night Call Nurses, and, of course, The Student Nurses. Corman was so successful with this series of low-budget sex-and-drama-with-a-little-politics films that he set out to create another series, sort of a spin-off of the The Student Nurses. This was to be the Teachers series.
The Student Teachers, a sometimes funny and somewhat dated film, was intended to parody, among other things: gangster films (with drug dealers like in French Connection) and sex-education films (like we used to see in health class). There is plenty of nudity, a few love scenes, dopey hippie characters, tough African-American characters, nice student-teachers who teach at a local high school, and Corman regular Dick Miller as a sexist, foul-mouthed physical education teacher (he's funny but turns real nasty).
Some of the film segments (most of them, actually) are extraneous and somewhat pointless; there are more plot lines here than in most Robert Altman films. The actresses are pretty, though, especially the blond character who has an artist boyfriend. Corman perfected his formula of success with the Teachers series, and Jonathan Kaplan shows a flair for editing and good camera work that he would later expand upon in Project X and Bad Girls. Kaplan seems to have fun with The Student Teachers, especially with the student sex films the characters watch and the dim-witted hippie character.
I saw this film on video, under the ridiculously misleading title "College Co-eds". The film is not about college (it's high school) and there are no co-eds to speak of. Still, it was fun to watch, and certainly is an interesting time capsule, a trip back to when things were simpler, people embraced the liberal lifestyle, and drive-ins still rocked. I wish I had been alive in 1974 to have seen this one in the back of a Dodge Dart, snuggling up to a girl with bell-bottoms and feathered hair.
I'm nostalgic, and I wasn't even there.
