Incoming Freshmen

I know several people who worked on Incoming Freshman and recently had an opportunity to view a black and white work print of the original edit. Not only was the film re-edited, but additional scenes were shot by the distributor which accounts for the much of gratuitous sex and nudity. This was done, obviously, to make the film more marketable. The original film was intelligent, well conceived and and not at all badly done considering the production budget was less than $50,000. It many ways, it was a much better film than Animal House which is often credited with being THE ground breaking film that started a new genre of movies. It was never intended to be a "soft porn" film, an unfortunate and undeserved characterization. The film was shot on location in Knoxville Tennessee by two University of Tennessee Graduate students. Many of the scenes were shot on and around campus and on the Cumberland Avenue strip. It would be worthwhile to somehow release a "restored" version of this film. If I'm not mistaken one or both of the directors did go on to have careers in Hollywood. My good friend Tommy Gibbons worked on Incoming Freshman as an assistant camera operator and is a great source of information on the film.

It's Boobapalooza '79 when the kids of Incoming Freshmen spend their golden college years partying hard and shunning bras. This aggressively shameless soft core T'n'A crowd pleaser treats us to everything from a lecture by a naked ROTC instructor to a frat party being entertained by a blues-rock band wearing goat masks. The movie advances on two parallel tracks: the main story of innocent small-town coed Jane (Ashley Vaughn) being gradually corrupted by her slutty roommate Viv (Leslie Blalock) and that of the tribulations of neurotic, sexually repressed history professor L.P. Bilbo (B.M. Culpepper). Jane starts out dedicated to her long-distance high school sweetheart, only to have her heart broken when her best friend back home hooks up with Mr. Perfect the first week of college, leaving an opening for roommate Viv to introduce her to her own boyfriend's best friend, Randy (Richard Harriman, looking very much like a young Dave Barry). At the same time Prof. Bilbo has trouble keeping his attention on his teaching as he spend more of every class mentally undressing his female students.

Events come to a head the weekend of the big football game when Viv persuades Jane that they should ditch their respective boyfriends and hit a swingin' frat party by themselves. Everybody has fun, lots of tits are shown, and morbidly obese Prof. Bilbo shows up dressed in a white suit and announces his newfound goal of getting "funky." Uber-slut character Maxine "The Machine" (Georgia Harrell), clad only in an extremely revealing gold lame one-piece looks down the pants of a delighted nerd and announces "What, all that meat and no potatoes?" before dragging him back to the nearest bedroom. The film ends with what is essentially a take-a-number gang bang in which the walrus-like history professor takes on one svelte college girl after another, culminating, in the last few seconds, with plain Jane herself. Not too worry, though - Dave Barry Jr. has managed to meet the tube top-wearing girl he had fantasized about earlier in the movie. So everybody ends up happy, in one way or another.

Incoming Freshmen has a couple of good aspects - the comedy value of the extremely dated apparel (tight jeans, bellbottoms, tall white tube socks with brightly colored rings at the top) and the thick southern accents sported by virtually every cast member, except for Jane's Dave Barry-like boyfriend. These people make The Dukes of Hazzard sound like Masterpiece Theater. The poorly-aging trashiness of the era is palpable; the scene where roommates Jane and Viv go on a double date to the local disco is so intensely 70s it could power a time machine. Recommended to fans of That 70s Show and long-term freebase addicts. Oh yeah, and to people who like tits.

I saw this film before it was sold for distribution and it was a very good film. I saw it after distribution at the theater and it was a completely different film. The film had been totally re-cut. A number of new scenes (the awful "southern" professor and the T and A) were added and the original film was pretty much lost. The storyline had no continuity due to the re-editing.

Though as one other reviewer mentioned, it is somewhat like Animal House (1978), but for a low-budget film, with "no-name" actors, the original (before re-edit) film was as good.

No, the acting won't be Oscar caliber. The film was shot on the cheap, and appears to have used many local actors. There is no real plot. The movie is very funny at times, and very, and I mean very dated at others. Yet, it's a really great throw back to an era of film making that's gone, and sadly, doesn't seem to be coming back. Rebecca Franklin, ALice Barrett, and Ashley Vaughn are genuine beautiful women who should have been given a shot to do other things. Barrett had the more of a career then the others. The saddest thing about the film is that Leslie Blalock died in a car accident before the film came out. Blalock was a calender girl come to life, live on film.

What needs to happen is the 70's drive in flicks need to find their way to DVD, via a box set, or on their own. Incoming Freshman is a drive in classic. A true gem of film-making that has been lost to history.

Actually, I typed this title just to see how thorough this database is. I was a bit surprised to see it here, but not that it hadn't been commented on. It played here in the early eighties with the far superior GAS PUMP GIRLS. It was a T'n'A ANIMAL HOUSE type of deal with a particularly cheap look. Stuff like this just doesn't make it into theatres anymore. There was a party scene where everybody wore goat masks. That's about all I remember. If I had seen this film by itself, I would have felt ripped off, but its companion film made the trip worthwhile.