Coach

If you are looking for an academy award winner, this movie is not for you. It's just a fun romp back to the late '70s, when movies like this were geared to the teen/drive-in "party crowd" audience. Cathy Lee Crosby as the "hottie" coach that has an affair with one of her students is what made the movies at the drive-ins stand out from whatever was playing at the indoor theatres & even on TV! The fact that Crown International released this movie is also a testament that you know you're going to be in for something special. If you are a fan of B movies/classic drive-in movies, this one would be a valued addition to your video library.

Desperate to improve the performance of their boys basketball team, Granger High School hires two time Olympic medallist Randy Rawlings as coach without checking the gender of their new employee. When the school's sexist principal Fenton Granger (Keenan Wynn) discovers that he has unwittingly hired a woman (Cathy Lee Crosby), he is keen to get rid of her, but finds that he is legally bound to let her have the job—at least until she messes up, something that he tries to ensure will happen sooner rather than later.

An attractive 'fish out of water' teacher slowly earning the respect of both her stuffy peers and her unruly students: not exactly the most original idea for a film, but I still found Coach an interesting watch if only for the fact that Crosby's character acts in a seriously inappropriate and unprofessional manner, first by striking up a sexual relationship one of her underage players (played a young Michael Biehn), and then by throwing all of her sporting principles out of the window by allowing her team to win their final match using underhanded means. And all with zero consequences for the naughty woman!!!

A supposedly responsible adult with such dubious moral standards is so unusual in a movie like this that I find it hard not to enjoy just a bit, despite a bland script and lifeless direction doing their utmost to convince me otherwise.

In this offering, BCI paired COACH with "The Beach Girls" as a "Welcome to the Grindhouse double feature." This film hardly belongs in this category.

A losing basketball team, a curmudgeon school administrator (brilliantly played by Keenan Wynn); and, an illicit affair between the coach and a student about sums up this movie.

In addition, while the main characters, played by Cathy Lee Crosby and Michael Biehn, work hard to make the film work, the filmmakers really created something of a disappointment with COACH.

Cathy Lee Crosby's character works well with the team. First, she shows them who's the boss after her first practice. Then, she brings in outside talent, pro basketball player Sidney Wicks. Finally; and, perhaps fate-fully, she participates in their ribald sing-a-long on the bus.

By the way, how many times did Crown International Pictures use that Woody Guthrie "Hey Lolly Lolly" tune anyway? In any case, the acting on the part of the team members is capable as well as their basketball playing.

The score is heavy on the easy listening, romance ballads, which makes COACH seem syrupy. The only exception is the funky "Go Stallions GO," which played during the montage of their winning games. The music really served to heighten the intensity of the game play.

But in the end, it's "Jabberwocky, Jabberwocky, Jabberwocky" that saves the day.

Overall, the movie is pretty light-hearted; and, hard to hate. I give it a 5 out of 10 just for the e. e. cummings reference.

This one acts as a satire during the women's rights movement era. Of course, that doesn't mean COACH (the movie) is a wonderful experience to behold. It runs into the same vein as FASTBREAK (which was better, but still tame), and is basically standard fare fluff. What I mean for this movie being uninteresting is simple to recognize. Anybody who serves time away from a normal job by training a bunch of lunatics earning their way to sudden victory makes waste. It's the same feeling you may get after watching this. A nice attempt at casting the opposite sex for a man's duty, but I expected better things.

A high-school boys' basketball team keeps losing games, resulting in the firing of their coach. The school head hires a renowned athlete called Randy Rawlings as a replacement. The only trouble is, it turns out the new coach is a woman and the sexist school head expected a man. Needless to say, the female coach mixes things up somewhat and even begins a relationship with one of her students.

Coach is another film from those arbiters of good taste, Crown International Pictures. Unlike quite a few of the films from these guys, however, this one isn't very salacious or schlocky. It has, at best, some throwaway, half-hearted nude scenes. In fact, I thought that this was one of the more thoughtful teen-oriented movies from its time. The main reason for this is that the central relationship is played out in a quite realistic and unsensational manner. It works pretty well and is pretty engaging due in no small part to the fine chemistry between leads Cathy Lee Crosby and a young Michael Biehn. Both actors both do very good work here and really go some way to elevating the material overall.

It was quite interesting to see the whole storyline about the coach having an affair with one of her students be played out in such an underplayed manner though, like this was the most normal turn of events imaginable. After all, this behaviour would nowadays generally result with a swift prison sentence! But I think most of us truthfully find it kind of difficult getting too upset when it's a hot female teacher taking a young male student under her wing – I reckon most of us guys would have been up for a bit of that when we were younger to be perfectly honest! And in any case, it's a scenario that is genuinely played out in a pretty mature manner here by the leads and is much more cute than ever salacious. By contrast, on a completely different tone, there is a silly sub-plot about a gangly boy who is unwittingly put under hypnosis in order to turn him into a superstar basketball player. This nonsense offsets the relationship stuff and ensures that this movie has at least one foot in the comedy genre. On the whole, I found this a kind of likable affair. It's predictable fluff in many ways, yet it is also well acted and has a definite fun factor to it. I say, yes.