One Night Only

The days of simple tacky funny not like before. They dont make these like they did. Fun and still likeable. The hockey fans like the hockey side story.

My review was written in June 1986 after watching the film on Key video cassette.

"One Night Only" is one of four Canadian features that rolled in November 1983 with financial backing from The Playboy Channel. Of interest only to voyeurs, feature, originally titled more appropriately "New Year's Eve", is an embarrassing example of what is euphemistically called Canadian content. It is currently available on video cassette.

Girls in a Montreal sorority house suddenly decide they want to go to bed with the players on the pro hockey team (apparently the Canadiens). Led by busty young blonde Anne (Lenore Zann) they maneuver to take over the annual New Year's Eve sex party traditionally organized by gangster Winkeau (Hrant Alianak) and borrow the posh mansion of the parents of sorority sister Elizabeth (Judy Foster) for the occasion. When there aren't enough college girls to service the pucksters, Anne recruits local prostitutes to join the party, led by beautiful Louellla (Taborah Johnson), who also coaches the coeds in lovemaking techniques.

Exercise in dumb puns and vulgarity is designed mainlyu to show off some pretty girls sans clothing, okay for Playboy viewers, but a bore as a feature film. Pic's lame concept of satire is evident when team owner Mack (Jeff Braunstein) has to force his hotshot star Johnny (Martin Neufeld) to engage in drinking and sex when all the youngster wants to do is play hockey, do endorsements and appear on tv.

For a basically tame softcore outing, scripter P. Y. Haines oddly emphasizes incest, with sevral of the couples imagining they're father & daughter or mothe & son during sex, and the romantic payoff occurring when young Anne beds down with her even younger cousin Jamie (Geofrey MacKay) . Cast does a good job and is worthy of much better material.

Casual fans of the early 80's T-and-A comedies (and their close cousins the early 80's slasher horror films) probably don't realize how much the country of Canada contributed to these "all-American" genres. Well, this particular film really wears its Canadian-ness on its sleeve as a group of sexy college co-eds decide (for reasons that eluded me)to prostitute themselves out to a visiting hockey team at a wild party they put together at a rich friend's house. The results are so over-the-top raunchy, they make "Porky's" look like a "Porky Pig" cartoon.

While I can't unreservedly rave about this kind of uber-hoser stupidity, there are several things that might make this worthwhile, at least for all the slobbering perverts out there. First, if you like early 80's slasher flicks like I do, you have undoubtedly seen the female Canuck leads--Lenore Zann, Helen Udy, and Wendy Landes--many times. Well, prepare to see a whole lot MORE of them here. Second, there's the very memorable climactic scene which involves the perverted middle-age coach (who'd I swear was in at least one "Porky's" movie) living out his fantasy of the "scary cave", an infantile-Oedipal thing that you really have to see to believe. (I'd personally rank it up there with the "baby carriage scene" in "Battleship Potemkin" in terms of truly unforgettable cinematic moments). And that's not the only queasy quasi-incest on display here. This has the typical innocent male virgin "losing it" to his long-sought-after true love scene, except in this case his "true love" happens to be his sexy first cousin! And while the virgin's moralistic cop father rushes to stop his son and niece from un-forking their family tree, HE gets sidetracked by one of his niece's young friends who takes him to bed and insists on calling him "daddy" (I'm starting to suspect there might be a reason why the Canadians sometimes look a little inbred. . .).

I suppose though if you're going to make an unapologetically raunchy, socially irresponsible, dementedly perverted flick like this, you may as well do it right. And this movie, if nothing else, certainly puts the puck in the net in that department.

This little straight-to-cable flick isn't The Godfather and it's not trying to be. But the combination of entry-level acting, burlesque humor, by-the-numbers 1980's pop music, too many topless lovelies to count, and a plot so implausible that it practically spits in the face of suspension-of-disbelief make this a delightfully cheesy piece of teenage-boy entertainment. The phrase "so bad it's good" doesn't even apply to this, because "bad" doesn't apply to it - it's pure escapist entertainment, and for my money, that's the best type. I saw this for the first time when I was 11 or 12 and in the habit of sneaking into my parents' den to watch Showtime Late Night on weekends (boys will be boys, right?) and this is one that always stuck in my memory. Finding a rental copy in college was a sublime moment and preserving it in digital is going to keep me young for another hundred years. Intellectual decompression at its finest.

This is one of the most enjoyable erotic comedies ever made, while not exactly subtle this really tickles the funnybone...oh and the ladies are gorgeous, not least Judy Foster starring as upperclass snobbish girl. Best line: Elisabeth: Do you want me to swallow a goldfish? The girls: Think bigger....and harder!

The wacky storyline revolves around a group of lady students making a buck on hijacking the sexparty for the city's hockyteam, meanwhile the American nephew of one of the girls turns up, with his born-again christian policeman father hot on the heels and a pimp mad about having his job hijacked. Everybody ends up in bed with everyone, lots of "Porky's" style humor. Great score and cast, this is a sadly overlooked gem that I have seen many times. 9/10