Getting It On

Originally titled "American Voyeur" but released as "Getting It On", this North Carolina-lense teenage comedy nimbly pumps new life into the overdone high school hijinks genre. Though marketed as another raunchy "Porky's" followup, the William Olsen production is a well-acted, sweet and funny picture.

Filmmaker Olsen targets our consumerist and video-obsessed culture for some ribbing in this story of high school freshman Alex Carson (Martin Yost), with a crush on the girl next door, Sally (Heather Kennedy). Devising a video software business to earn money, Alex borrows his startup capital (at 15% interest) from his very businesslike dad, and with the help of his cutup classmate Nicholas (Jeff Edmond) takes the video equipment to record hidden camera footage of Heather and other pretty girts. When Nicholas is kicked out of school by mean principal White (Charles King Bibby), the heroes enlist he services of a friendly prostitute (Kim Saunders) to record footage of White in flagrante delicto.

What makes this material work is a fresh, enthusiastic cast, witty writing and direction by Olsen that bears no hint of malice. Though Alex's parents are caricatures, more interested in getting the latest satellite dish installed in the backyard than in their son's future, they are drawn as ingratiating characters, and even the practical joke directed against the principal turns out to benefit everyone, with no hard feelings. The script even includes a subplot reminiscent of the Matt Dillon-starrer "Tex", concerning Nicholas and his older brother Irving without parental supervision.

Young, attractive cast members match the teenage role requirements, though the pleasant lead player Martin Yost, an empathetic Timothy Hutton type, is of course older than the virginal 14-year-old in the script. Of special note is Bryan Elsom, very funny in a small role as a loquacious young Southern cab driver.

Tech credits for this modestly-budgeted effort are fine.

My review was written in August 1983 after a Times Square screening.

"Getting It On" takes a seedy, repugnant premise, and then fails to go anywhere even particularly smutty with it. It's a movie about a teenager who apparently has hidden cameras in multiple areas around town filming girls taking their clothes off and having sex... and then makes you wait more than half the length of the movie before it shows you a glimpse of bare breast.

If this is confusing, it's nothing compared to the movie's "plot", which receives so little exposition that the movie makes little, if any, sense. I understood that the movie's protagonist has a flair for filming girls without them realising it, and also likes his next door neighbour. He has the typical goofy, obnoxious best friend who encourages him into emulating this behaviour when he is around the girl of his dreams, when he should just be "being himself".

I didn't really understand the point of the voyeuristic sequences, when the main character watches, for example, a group of girls having a pillow fight he has apparently filmed. This is, I guess, what sets the movie apart from other teen T'n A flicks, but in the movie itself it amounts to nothing. It could have been sleazily exploited to show more skin, and let's face it, it probably should have been! This is why people watch these movies, after all. However there is so little nudity in the movie, and the kid's voyeurism adds nothing to the story, so what was the point of it?

At one point it seems that his creepy hobby is going to save the day when his best friend is about to be sent to an all boys' school due to misbehaviour. The boys get a prostitute off the street, take her to a weird fancy dress party where both adults and teens are in attendance and the best friend dresses like a Klansman, and have the hooker seduce the kid's dad while on videotape.

They then play the film on the TV set the dad and his wife are watching, so that the wife can see her husband's adultery. What was the point of this? Revenge? Blackmail would have seemed a more obvious option. The response of the couple is even more bizarre and inexplicable.

Overall though, I enjoyed this movie. It's not as repugnant as it could have been, and I couldn't help but like the two main characters.

The phrase "so bad, it's good" gets thrown around way too much. A lot of movies like this one are not really THAT bad, and they're certainly not "good" in any sense of the word. But due to their very low-budgets, independent origins, and, yes, some amount of film-making ineptitude, they manage to be kind of, uh, well, different in a kind of interesting way. Although this is called "Getting It On", for instance, the two teen protagonists never do technically get around to really "getting it on". Most of the sex here actually involves the two heroes' balding, middle-age principal who they set up with a hooker, and the principal's sexy daughter who is involved with one of the protagonist's older brother.

The main protagonist, "Alex" (Martin Yost), is a video voyeur who uses early 80's video technology to spy on all the neighbor girls, including the pretty new-girl-next-door (Heather Kennedy) , who he also openly romances at the same time, and who somehow doesn't find his voyeurism the least bit creepy at all. However, when his best friend,"Nick", an orphan who lives with his older brother is in danger of being sent to a juvenile hall (for stealing a porno magazine!), he decides to take action by using his video equipment. In perhaps the weirdest scene in this weird movie, the protagonist, his friend, and the friend's brother--in order to put their crackpot plan into action--sneak into a local community costume party all dressed as Ku Klux KLANSMAN(!) and nobody even NOTICES!! I don't know if this is wry subversive genius or complete ineptitude on the part of the filmmakers, but it sure is different.

Of course, there is a smattering of female nudity involving the principal's daughter, and some neighborhood girls who are having a slumber party that turns into a sexy topless pillow fight (as girls' slumber parties invariably do). The two protagonists also spend a lot of time watching the girls' P.E. class, who wear VERY short gym shorts and seem to do A LOT of stretching. But what I really liked about this movie was it's sheer indie weirdness. I don't mean "indie" in the pretentious modern-day sense--most modern-day "indie" films are actually backed by Hollywood--I mean these old, truly independent exploitation films made by Middle American regional filmmakers who would never come anywhere NEAR legitimate Hollywood, and really had a COMPLETELY different sensibility. Anyway, if you like this movie, also check out another very bizarro early 80's teen comedy called "Incoming Freshman".

GETTING IT ON bills itself as a typical promiscuous sex comedy and fails miserably. It is a painfully amateur production with a cast of no-names that tend to make a viewer cringe every time they open their mouths. The cast is lead by Martin Yost, who plays Alex, a teen-age Peeping Tom who decides to turn his perverted pastime into a money-making scheme. His father blindly agrees to give his son the $4000 to start a security surveillance business, which Alex can then use as an excuse to spy on other people, presumably "in the act". The father is unbelievably naive. It would have helped if the father was more suspicious of what his son was doing with all this expensive equipment. As for the "peep" sequences, they are far and few in the film and lack imagination for what the film is trying to advertise. No new ground is broken here.

There is no drive to the film. It is dull and the actors just seem to be going through the motions. That and the director tries to use two different sequences in which an actor pulls a gun on someone else as a surprise comedic effect, which is a lousy attempt at cheap laughs. The film weighs in at about 90 minutes, and by 90 minutes it's too long! Don't bother with this one. Try PORKY'S or MISCHIEF instead.

Two high school video nerds use cameras to peep on classmates in their underwear. No hilarity ensues. The cast actually appears to be playing a coming of age sex comedy straight! And (almost) without the sex...

Putting aside the creepy and legally actionable invasion of privacy premise, Mr. William Olsen, if you are trying to make one of the hundred or so no budget 80s teen romps that came out in the wake of Porky's - many direct-to-VHS - start by writing a few JOKES. If your budget is so small that driving to an audio-video store in a borrowed Gremlin counts as an action scene, if the best film stock you can afford has resolution below the quality of a late night infomercial, if your cast has less experience than the theatre department of the local community college, and your cameraman has to use in situ track lighting, you can still get by as long as the viewer has something to laugh at and a few busty co-eds. That's the basic formula. But here we get little of either.

The leaden pace is a hindrance as well. TV sitcoms also lack cinematic flair and are shot on only two or three sets. But any sitcom producer knows that all that is forgivable if you can wring some laughs out of the situation and keep things moving. A little character humour, some insult comedy, a bit of bug-eyed hyperbole, a few classic set up and payoff exchanges, a squirmy situation or two... Throw us SOMETHING. A badumbump joke. A prop gag. A pratfall. Manufacture a laugh and then push things ahead to the next setup.

No sex comedy with this little gratuitous nudity should be this utterly devoid of guffaws too. This is what results from failing at your one job.