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.

while being one of the "stars" of this film doesn't necessarily give me sage insight, i do know quite a bit of what was first there...and what ended up on the screen. i remember seeing the original cut of "incoming freshman" and being very pleased. it was funny, sexy, raunchy, all the main requirements of a drive-in film. you have to remember this was shot and released before all the rest...animal house, porky's, etc...so in its own way, this flick was truly ahead of its time. for whatever reasons, the film was given to the main distributors who editing out half the original film, and then edited in (should i say "shuffled?") THE most random scenes ever. the fat guy, the people with goat heads....what the heck was all that?! i'm sure it was put in for additional T&A, but it was so slowly paced, it caused anything going on prior to it to grind to a screeching and painful halt. but all in all, it's a fun memory for me...especially in that i'm able to say that the worst movie i've ever seen...i'm in!

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.

The original edit of IF finally got a public showing on June 16, 2012 in Knoxville at the Relix Theatre, to an SRO crowd which included a couple of original cast members. The viewing was put on by the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound.

The original version is much better than what Cannon released, and the L.A. Times review from 1979 even mentioned that there seemed to be a disconnect between the two parts of the film.

Google "Knoxploitation" for a Metro Pulse story on the film and its production, which includes some fabulous stills shot during filming. A significant (or not) piece of the original was footage shot on US Highway 129 ("Deal's Gap" or "The Dragon" to tourists) from the back of a Ducati 750ss. This footage was included in the 2012 showing.

Been a while seen I've seen it -- saw it on videotape in the 80s -- but I recall it wasn't too bad and had some cute girls. I can still recall the opening scene where the professor is imagining one of his students nude, so I have to say the movie is at least more memorable than a lot of the others of the same type.