My review was written in November 1986 after a screening at Movies at Town Center in Boca Raton, Florida.
"Welcome to 18", originally titled "Summer Release", is a ho-hum approach to the usual teenage comedy-drama about youngsters (in this case 18-year-old girls) finding out about the cold, cruel world and adults who inhabit it. The format worked as drive-in fodder about 15 years ago, but this watered-down version lacks even titillation value.
An attractive cast is headed by striking blonde Courtney Thorne-Smith as Lindsey, who hops in her convertible with redhead pal Robin (Jo Ann Willette) and brunette Joey (Mariska Hargitay) to spend the post-high school graduation summer working at a dude ranch in Nevada.
Overly busy and unconvincing plotline has the trio splitting quickly from the ranch after they are cheated in the first payroll and forbidden to fraternize with the hunks there. They go to the mansion of a girl they've met, Talia (Cristen Kauffman) at Lake Tahoe where her young gangster-lover Roscoe (E Erich Anderson) gets the girls phony IDs and jobs working at a casino.
The girls end up at a rundown motel in the mountains where they make new friends including a goofy entomologist and a sympathetic transvestite neighbor. After a party involving prostitution and drugs, the three girls end up in jail and are bailed out for $5,000 by Roscoe, who steals Lindsey's car as collateral until he's repaid.
While trying to protect alia from this young brute, the girls devise a scheme in which Lindsey ends up winning about $15,000 in a poker game for local high rollers (it's never explained how Lindsey is so proficient at poker). After two of the girls succeed in having sex with their new boyfriends, a happy ending is contrived of them spiriting Talia away from Roscoe and all four heading for San Francisco befoe the fall college term begins.
Aided by an appealing se of players, picture tries to give young girls various lectures on the false lures of the fast life (living high, wild parties, gambling, prostitution, etc.) but sends out the same old messages of the genre, especially re: sex as fulfillment of the transition to womanhood.
Director Terry Carr displays the dreaded influence of music videos, with feature having more silent-plus-music montates than most films had even at the height of romantic filler interludes in the 1960s. Four lead actresses all deserve better vehicles in future.
