Vice Academy

Maybe the most ridiculous movie I've ever been privy to. I admit, I have a weakness for movies with 'Academy' in the title; Combat Academy is a particular favourite. This, however, takes the proverbial cake. It's surreal: the acting(atrocious), the dialogue(and lack thereof), the plot(a porn movie) and cheap production values that would have Johnny LaRue turning in his grave. Basically it's 90 minutes of attractive ladies running around a city trying to arrest hookers, drug dealers and porn stars. Porn queen Ginger Lynn Allen's talent(as minute as they might be) are totally wasted. It's Police Academy minus Steve Guttenberg and a budget multiplied by poor actresses who'd do anything to take their clothes off to make money. My only hope is that no one made anything above scale for this flick... the actresses should have paid the producer to be in it. If you're looking for some excellent vapid entertainment, nice shots of bosom and some laughs, rent it. If you want anything else, I'd look elsewhere.

"Vice Academy" is purportedly a sex comedy spoof of "Police Academy", which was itself a spoof, I guess. What's funny is that for a sex comedy version of that movie, it probably has less nudity than it, and of course, no sex.

I don't know what those involved were thinking. This one boasts not only b-movie starlet and scream queen Linnea Quigley, who is still most famous for her naked graveyard dance in "Return of the Living Dead", but also a bona fide porn star in Ginger Lynn Allen. So why no sex and hardly any nudity? American sex comedies never show any sex, so it's no surprise that there's none to be had here. But why barely any nudity?

It seems like the filmmakers were having too much fun making the movie to include anything that might make you want to watch. The whole thing has this feeling as though everybody involved thought they were being hilarious. Perhaps they were laughing at us for watching this garbage, expecting a good time?

I might as well summarise the plot, or at least the set-up (there's no plot, really). It's about a class of bimbos apparently learning to be vice cops, which means they have the freedom to go out and play dress-up and pretend to be prostitutes or johns or whatever. Eventually they meet a madam named Queen Bee, with a huge beehive hairdo, who I guess is supposed to be the main bad guy. The dialogue is delivered in this weird stilted way, like every line is a wonder to the ear, and the soundtrack mickey-mouses everything out the wazoo, as though these are jokes that need underlining.

But where are the jokes?

This is the greatest straight-to-video movie ever made. The whole series is great! So bad that it's good...The corny script, the bad acting...Rick Sloane delivers all the crap in a talented way that I'm sure no one could reproduce.It all makes me so giddy...I'm even in the fan club. God, I love this movie.

In order to graduate from a law enforcement school known as the Vice Academy each of the students are required to arrest a certain number of criminals prior to a set date. One of them, "Holly Wells" (Ginger Lynn) has a huge advantage because her father just happens to be the Chief of Police and gives her all of the resources available to him to be used at her convenience. Unfortunately, she is hardly discreet about it and cheerfully boasts about her successes to everyone else in the classroom. This especially annoys three of her less-fortunate classmates named "Didi" (Linnea Quigley), "Shawnee" (Karen Russell) and "Dwayne" (Ken Abraham) who are having great difficulty trying to pass. So with essentially nothing to lose the three of them concoct a plan to apprehend a notorious prostitution ring which has managed to defeat the entire police force to date. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a crude, low-budget comedy which contained a ridiculous plot and less-than-stellar acting. Yet even with these drawbacks it still managed to be somewhat entertaining all the same. I honestly cannot explain why but I thought some of the scenes were quite amusing. That said, I have rated this movie accordingly. Average.

My review was written in March 1989 after watching the movie on Prism video cassette.

It takes a quickie, direct-to-video pic like "Vice Academy" to make the latter day "Police Academy" series look good.

Former porn star Ginger Lynn Allen teams up with current softcore star Linnea Quigley as warring police cadets studying to join the L. A. vice squad. Pic limns their unfunny (nor for lack of trying) misadventures as prostitutes, porn stars, etc., to entrap unsuspecting sleazeballs.

The two blonde leads are nice to look at, while newcomer Karen Russell amply fills the tease genre gap left by her namesake Betsy Russell. Filmmaker Rick Sloane's most daring motif is spoofing another ex-porn starlet Traci Lords, but effort is generally puerile.