American Teenagers

Losin' It is a crude but amusing story about some frustrated high school boys who want very much to loose their virginity. So they take a car ride to Tijuana and get into some trouble while "Losin' It". Losin' It is not a typical hollywood movie. I think it is slightly better than its rating on IMDB, but maybe not worth paying for. The title is a play on words, BTW.

Losin' It is a pretty funny roadtrip movie, thanks to the comedic antics of Jackie Earle Haley ('Breaking Away') who plays Dave, an oversexed kid desperate from some action during a weekend in Mexico. He and his buddies, Woody (Tom Cruise) clean cut shy kid, headlong Spider (the gorgeous John Stockwell) and Dave's clever brother Wendell (John P. Navin Jr.), embark on a wild roadtrip to lust after girls and underaged booze in 1965.

Each of the guys has their own experiences with love and mischief. Woody spends most of the time with Kathy (Shelly Long), a flamboyant older woman who hitched a ride with the boys to get a quickie divorce. Spider, the ego, abandons the group and frequently gets in trouble with a corrupt sheriff. Wendell, who came along for lots of black market goodies, spends the weekend trying to save his brother's ass, since Dave's misconception that the town is full of easy women gets him in heavy trouble with the locals.

It's a pretty funny movie that I'm surprised hasn't been given more notoriety among 80s fans. Tom Cruise and John Stockwell played their typical characters, but the stars of this movie, were really Jackie Earle Haley and John Navin. They were perfect.

I saw this movie in an entirely appropriate place -- as part of an all-night quadruple feature at a cinema in Northern Ontario, which could have been more accurately described as "Four lousy films for the price of one"! (For the record, the other three films were "Ghoulies", "Missing in Action" and "Ninja III - The Domination").

I would say that Losin' It is probably the best of these four films – not that that's really saying very much. (It was the concluding feature of a very long night of cinematic mediocrity) . It's not an awful film (particularly compared with some of the other components of this multiple feature), and it has the advantage of having been put together by a crew who knew what they were doing. Rather, it's an assembly line teen film of the period, which is given somewhat more polish than usual by the presence of Shelley Long and the up-and-coming Tom Cruise in the cast.

Two years previously in 1981, Porky's established a profitable template for teen films that many producers are still exploiting today. I see Losin' It as a Porky's knock-off, from a similar time and aimed at a similar audience. Essentially, if you were part of that target audience, you would probably have enjoyed it. I was just passing out of the target demographic when I saw this, so perhaps I'm more blasé about it than I might have been if I had seen it a few years earlier. There's a whole genre of teen sex comedy (which tries to tease the audience while dancing around the fact that they can't really show very much) that loses a lot of its impact once you've actually "lost it" yourself.

I thought that this movie was very funny the first time I saw it ten years ago, and I still do today. This is a movie that is in the same genre as Porky's or Revenge of the Nerds. True fact, Tom Cruise said in a Playboy interview that he did this movie because of Jackie Earle Haley. Since Haley had been in Breaking Away, Cruise figured that this movie would be just as good. It didn't quite work out the way he expected, at least not right away. Cruise fan or not, it's worth a look. For me, Jackie pretty much steals every scene he's in. Anytime I watch this movie, I have to laugh at Tom Cruise because he ended up becoming one of the biggest stars in the movie world, and he started out in this. If you REALLY want to see Cruise in another light, check out Endless Love, with Brooke Shields. It's his first movie, and though he's in it for less than a minute, it's worth a look, just like Losin' It. Check it out!

I loved this movie cause it's so funny and it has the then unknown Tom Cruise and Shelley Long in this movie before they went onto fame later on the 80's, but the best performance goes to Jackie Earle Haley as Dave, who is a sex obsessed pal who is a Frank Sinatra wannabe, and I also liked John Stockwell's character Spyder who came from a broken home, Tom Cruise is the intellegent honor student. This movie is about 3 high school seniors who want to go to Tijuana in search of sex (without their parents knowing it) and things don't work out the way they want it as Dave's little brother Wendell 'Wimp' (John Navin) goes along for the ride and later they shoplift a grocery store and the owner's wife goes with them cause she claims that she's gonna divorce him and she finds out that they stoled some items at the grocery store but she didn't care, the situations that the boys got themselves in Tijuana are hilarious and they later meet crooked cops, insane marine sailors and junkyard ruffians, will they get out of Tijuana alive, will the three boys lose their virginity, in order to find out, watch this movie and it's way better than the movies of today, I think that Losin' It deserves more recognition than what it gets cause it's a funny movie and if you can find this movie at your local video store, rent it and have a good laugh, it's a great way to spend a weekend evening.