Kiss Games

My Tutor, a shameless exploration of arrested male teen-age sexual fantasy, is a forgettable film for everybody except the kids who were going through puberty when the film was released. For those fortunate viewers, however, the film is a heady trip down memory (and mammary) lane. Matt Lattanzi (Mr. Olivia Newton John) will astonish you with his wooden acting and breathy voice. Crispin Glover will make you howl with his mannered delivery -- especially as he does a turn or two on the S/M wheel of a friendly neighborhood bordello. Caren Kaye delights as the world-wise French tutor who fuels young Lattanzi's vivid imagination with her nocturnal skinny dips in the family pool. Also notable: the jaw-dropping title pop tune warbled over the opening credits as limber vixens are put through the paces of an aerobic workout.

This movie first came out in the 1980's era of "stupid teen flicks" but really if it were to be released this year would seriously be a nice "date movie" that anyone could enjoy because it seriously is a movie that would be very relevant for anyone out there in the relationship world who needs to see how to be a nice person. The movie starts out with the young boy "Bobby" who is obviously very overly hormone driven finding out that his summer is going to be spent with a woman tutor who is going to teach him French. "Karen Kaye" winds up being his beautiful tutor who over the course of the summer winds up teaching him how to be nice and respectful of women. She basically holds the whole movie together and does an excellent job of it. She was the perfect choice for the part. Once the two of them do fall in love, even the love scene that everyone is waiting for is done tastefully. Terry does a wonderful job of teaching Bobby how to be a "real man". You actually enjoy watching them together. This movie is now available on DVD and is worth getting and watching with that "someone special".

Yes, this is one of the early entries into the unending series of sexploitation movies about male teenagers with raging hormones looking for relief. But also, yes, I quite enjoyed it and gave it a respectable viewers rating - so I have a little explaining to do, even though I do not fully understand why this somewhat simplistic film appealed to me in the way that it did.

Perhaps it is simply that after an unending series of "Porky's" like movies, any film which features believable characters that are marginally more than cardboard cut-outs automatically gets rated more highly than it deserves. I cannot dispute the fact that this is not really a good movie, but it is so much better than most of its contemporaries covering the same scene that I feel it deserves to be recognised. In the story we have a young man of intelligence, born to rich parents and destined for Yale, who meets a glitch when he fails his French examination. He has to resit this, and is lucky enough to have a father who engages a very attractive young lady as his private coach to see that the resit is successful. Whether flowing juices improve study or not, may be debatable; but in this case the tutor not only meets Bobby's academic needs, but also recognises the basic problem he faces, liking him enough to guide him towards achieving a more mature appreciation of the mutual responsibilities any loving relationship will impose. This part of the film is handled with unusual sensitivity and in my opinion elevates the film from a piece of soft porn to a serious and significant treatment of an important social issue. Caren Kaye's treatment of her role as Terry, the tutor, deserves the highest praise - with a different leading lady this film could have been a complete disaster. In addition Kevin McCarthy, as the father, also delivers a fine performance in the character of someone wealthy enough to believe that he can buy whatever he needs or wants, and the scene towards the end of the film when his son turns upon him for the first time is quite well handled.

In parallel with this we are presented with the classic Hollywood slapstick treatment of a story about Bobby's best friend who is experiencing similar urges and makes continual disastrous efforts to satisfy them. This occupies a significant part of the first third of the film and is just awful. The two threads of the story are so far apart in their mood and appeal that my reactions when watching this film varied from a loud cheer to a bored yawn, depending upon which thread the current sequence belonged to. Presumably someone in the studio felt that a generous measure of this type of slapstick would be required in order to increase the overall appeal of the film. If so the person concerned should have been drummed out of Hollywood at short notice. The two themes are totally incompatible and if this secondary story had not been kept mercifully subordinate the whole film would have been completely ruined. As it is, it is quite easy to understand how viewers ratings for this film can vary from very high to very low. The average viewers rating recorded on the IMDb database at the moment is 4.5 out of 10, but there was an unusual spread with significant numbers of viewers rating it both very highly (8-10) and very poorly (1-3).

There were two scenes that I particularly enjoyed. The first was the one featuring a girl in a telephone booth, This starts when Bobby encounters the situation we have all experienced when waiting to make an important call, where the person occupying the 'phone booth is behaving as if about to leave it, but never quite does so; and it develops to the point where he is watching what ensues with fascination. In these days of cellular phones it will not be long before this scene becomes almost meaningless for many young people, but in the meantime it is a minor gem of its kind. Jewel Shepard, who plays the girl, is an under appreciated actress and I wish we could have seen more of her. The second, and far the more important of these two scenes, was the one showing the parting of Bobby and Terry. Here Bobby's education has progressed to the point where he appreciates that his tutor has developed a genuine affection for him, and that he has a moral responsibility not to let her down too sharply. His relief when it becomes clear that she intends to make a complete and clean break, is palpable. Again this was not an easy scene to present with the necessary sensitivity, but the director deserves about 7 out of 10 for his treatment of it. It is only spoiled right at the end by a grotesque display of relief by Bobby which should have been trimmed, but instead was turned into a freeze frame used as the background throughout the painfully slow scrolling of cast members and credits.

Overall I feel inclined to rate this film at what is probably a generous 6 out of 10. Watch it with your significant other when you simply want to relax together one evening. No doubt I have missed other similar films released more recently which treat the same theme with equal sensitivity, but the only comparable one that I remember seeing was "Y Tu Mama Tambien", released in 2001. Almost twenty years has been a long time to wait!

One of the more prominent teen exploitation sex romps of the early 1980s. My Tutor is the same type of thing we saw in Private Lessons. It's all basically a teenage boy's fantasy about having an affair with a beautiful older woman. Every so often you hear about this kind of thing happening in real life, so there may even be a little more to the concept than pure fantasy.

Matt Lattanzi plays the lucky young man in this film. For those of you who may have forgotten about this guy, he was kind of the Kevin Federline of the 1980s. He was a back-up dancer on the set of Xanadu who somehow won Olivia Newton-John over. The two were married for several years. Lattanzi plays a young man named Bobby. He seems nice enough, but is very shy with women. He also has just flunked his final exam in French class, and will have to re-take it and do very well or Yale will not let him attend in the fall. Bobby really doesn't want to go to Yale. He'd rather study astronomy at UCLA. Not a bad choice actually. I'm sure the women there are much better-looking! His father will hear nothing of astronomy, though! He hires a beautiful older woman to teach Bobby French, but Bobby is understandably more interested in winning her over! Caren Kaye plays Terry Green, the tutor. She is a stunningly beautiful woman who shows us plenty of what she has to offer! Yum! The bulk of the film details her attempts to teach Bobby French, and his attempts to become her man.

The film has a few dumb subplots that go nowhere. One deals with Terry's idiotic ex-boyfriend trying to hook back up with her. Another deals with Bobby's mother and their domestic help pulling the wool over her eyes. Crispin Glover is pretty funny as Bobby's best friend who is frantically trying to get laid. (weren't we all back then?) My Tutor is very, very light on plot. It mostly exists to titillate the audience, but there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing pretentious, and nary a serious moment in the entire romp, unless you count Bobby's wreck of his motor scooter later on.

The film is hurt by some really really awful music and songs. It is also badly under-lit. Lattanzi is a better actor than you might expect. His voice is a little high, but that fits this character pretty well. The film is filled with gobs of nudity and sexual situations. Take my word for it... you will get what you paid for in terms of t&a.

Considering what this film tries to be, and what it actually accomplishes, it is worth about 6 of 10 stars. A harmless romp from a much more innocent era of film-making.

The Hound.

In reference to the previous user comment: I was one of those fortunate enough to go though puberty shortly after this film was released. Not a great movie, by any means, but for those of us to young to go into the "back room," this movie was a perfect answer. Unfortunately (or very fortunately, depending on how you look at it), they don't make films like this anymore. Teensploitation movies now are all very farcical and don't even try to take themselves seriously. Once you get past all the T&A, in this movie, you start to feel sorry for the actors in this movie who actually have some talent. They seem to be trying very hard to make a good film while carrying some of the blandest people ever to grace the silver screen. If you long for some fond memories, pick this up on a boring weekend while everyone else is out of town.