El profesor

I first saw "The Teacher" at a drive-in. I have owned it on VHS video and have ordered it on DVD. It is one of my all-time favorites and I guess, a guilty pleasure. I agree that Angel Tompkins carries the film and that Jay ("Dennis The Menace") North was a strange and rather ironic choice for her co-star. I don't recall any scene where they have sex on a rooftop in the rain, as someone else has previously commented and I have seen the film quite a few times. It is a breezy and enjoyable film, despite the strange, unexpected, out-of-place and unnecessary subplot about a psychotic admirer of Angel Tompkins character and an unexpected finale.

A hot-looking female teacher seduces a student while a psycho stalks them. In a plot that is not grounded in reality, the most implausible element is that this beautiful teacher practically throws herself at the doofus student but he avoids her like a scared puppy. Former child star North is terrible as the clueless student. Tompkins, a B-movie actress of the 1970s, is gorgeous and sexy as the "older" woman trying to impart carnal knowledge. She also gives a pretty good performance and is the main reason for watching this low-budget film. James is creepy as the psycho, but serves more as comic relief than as a scary villain.

One of the handful of pictures made by Hikmet Avedis, a classifiable low-budget director of not-quite schlock and drive-in flicks, The Teacher is ostensibly about a 28 year old teacher (lovely Angel Tompkins)- the hottie of the town without a husband as he's a drifter/biker somewheres- who bonds with the shy 18 year old former student neighbor (1/2 dimensional Jay North) and start up a passionate affair. This part of the story is basically more or less just a Penthouse letter extended to feature length (and, oddly enough for a drive-in flick, the amount of sex is actually shown to a minimum, above the belt as it were). What makes it just a little bit more interesting, if also insane, is the character Ralph (crazy-eyed Anthony James), who comes off like a 2nd string James Bond villain missing a couple of acting classes.

He's weird and a snoop, with an obsession with Diane holding a torch for her unofficially while also trying to hunt down Sean after the death of his younger brother. It seems stranger still why Ralph would be so distraught over his brother's death when all Ralph seems to do is sit in his warehouse by the harbor, take out a pair of binoculars from his coffin (which comes out of the mysterious hearse he drives around) which also has a rifle. But he's a villain nonetheless, creeping up at pretty much any instance Sean and Diane are out, or even while they're on her boat making love as he creeps up like a Z-grade Aquaman.

If nothing else his ridiculous performance of an even sillier, deranged cat makes it watchable, when all else is just kind of mundane romance (North especially can barely act his way out of a paper bag, at least Tompkins has her sex appeal). It's nothing very special, or memorable, but if the title ever came up in conversation it would be fun to wax poetic about Anthony James as Ralph, or to contemplate the ways it could make a decent self-made MST3K feature.

Former "Dennis the Menace" star Jay North and WIP-vet Angel Tompkins star in this ridiculous story of an affair between a student and a "teacher" (funny, we never see her actually teaching anything). Tompkins clocks some obligatory nude scenes, but anyone expecting a softcore sex romp is going to be pretty disappointed--this movie has an actual (if completely deranged) plot where both characters are being stalked by a crazed Vietnam vet who's obsessed with the teacher and blames the kid for the death of his younger brother (don't ask). Any entertainment value is purely unintentional, however. The kid's parents are especially hilarious. The mother foists her son on this "older woman", saying things like:"I know he's my son, but I find Sean very attractive." His father on the other hand is totally alarmed that his boy might be making the beast with two backs with a sexy, 28-year-old woman (every father's worst nightmare I'm sure). It all ends completely preposterously. This is evidently supposed to be a tragic drama, but I would recommend it as a so-bad-it's-good comedy were it not for the very slow final act and the wretched, vomit-inducing theme song. OK, but not great.

For thirty-three years I'd been jonesing to see THE TEACHER, grindhouse auteur Hikmet Avedis' homage to THE GRADUATE, which somehow eluded me during its original Times Square run. Blessed is the patient schlock film fan, for his forbearance shall be rewarded. Thanks to the miracle of DVD and the munificence of BCI Eclipse, I finally caught up with this much-touted jewel in the Crown International catalog, and am pleased to report that it was all that and a bag of Swavorski rhinestones. Like its contemporary, THE GODFATHER: PART II, THE TEACHER is daring in its narrative structure. Unlike the Coppola film it's also ludicrous in the extreme, but then you can't have everything. Part leering soft-core romp, part tender coming-of-age drama, part stalk-and-chill suspenser, the movie's mismatched ingredients come together to form a blissfully surreal, silly whole.

The cast list alone makes it deserving of enshrinement in the Psychotronic Hall of Fame.

First and foremost, there's top-billed and bottom-perfect Angel Tompkins as a middle schooler's fantasy come to life, the hubba hubba homeroom teacher who just happens to be freshly divorced, hot to trot, and living right down the block. Charming and sensitive, Tompkins gives a performance that goes above and beyond the call of booty. She invests the role with such persuasive passion that one can almost believe her attraction to a most unlikely lust object: Jay North, the actor formerly known as Dennis the Menace, age twenty-two, sporting a double chin, a perpetual smirk, a Little Lord Fauntleroy page boy, and no discernible acting talent. To his credit, North is in the moment and then some during several graphic clinches with Angel.

Mr. Wilson would have been aghast. Or green with envy. I was both.

The call sheet also includes such bizarro world superstars as Med Flory (Worshefski, the bullying football player, in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR) as North's bullying father, Barry "Janos Skorzeny" Atwater as a snoopy sheriff, BURNT OFFERING's Anthony James as a psycho stalker, and in WTF-writ large cameos, Katherine "Mother of John" Cassevetes and Lady "Mother of Gena" Rowlands as a pair of chattering restaurant patrons.