Hotel Screwball

My review was written in March 1989 after watching the film on MCA video cassette.

"Screwball Hotel" is a painless but overly familiar sex comedy. Universal briefly released it last December4 in Florida (where pic was lensed), with ancillary markets likely to provide effective returns commencing with May video release.

Well-worn formula, familiar from endless Cannon releases, has three young guys on the loose amidst beautiful women in an idyllic resort setting. Jeff Greenman plays the stereotypical fat boy, kicked out of a Massachusetts military school with mates Michael C. Bendetti and Andew Zeller.

Trio heads to Florida to work at the Rochester Hotel whose staff has quit over back pay. They unite with pretty staffer Lori Deann Pallet to try and save the hotel from corrupt schemer Charles Ballinger by organizing weird fundraising efforts, including illegal casino gambling and an oil wrestling contest.

Loosely directed by Rafal Zielinski, whose "Screwballs" is a forerunner in the same genre, pic features relatively little nudity but plenty of tease. Former Penthouse models Corinne Alphen (a vet of similar "Spring Break" feature), Lori Deann Pallet and Andi Bruc add to the pulchritude, with fellow looker Laurah Guillen also handling okay slapstick comedy bits.

With British backing from London-based Avatar, pic seems tailored for the U. K. market and has popular Yank-in-Blighty comedian Kelly Monteith prominently featured. He does tv-type skits, dressing up as Indiana Jones or Bogie in "Casablanca '', as part of his varied sex games with Guillen.

Problem is that the script (credited to five writers) isn't very funny, especially the old-fashioned spoofing of drugs and silly satire of prudish, hypocritical televangelists (much better handled in Universal's recent "Fletch Lives" release). Tech credits are fine and pic boasts a bouncy out-theme sung by Fire on Blonde.

This is one of those movies that seemed to run non stop back during the early days of HBO. Most people today don't realize that HBO used to be just like what Cinemax Late Night is today, it was non-stop T&A. As a young whipper snapper, I used to stay up late at night to watch movies like this. Screwball Hotel is your standard jiggle movie. Three screw-ups get fired from their lousy jobs, and end up working at a hotel. During the course of the movie they have many run in's with the hotel's guests, resulting in a few crazy and sexy situations.

However, what I remember most about this movie is the ending. Somehow some kind of drug gets let loose in the air conditioning vents, and ends up being inhaled with some beauty queens getting ready for a beauty contest being held at the hotel. Of course, the drug turns them all into hot to trot horn dogs. During the last scene, the girls perform a heavy metal ballad, recite a dirty poem, and end it all by tearing off each other's clothes. Back when I was a kid, I thought this was the sexiest movie I had ever seen.

Despite this movie's rating, I don't remember any nudity or actual sex scenes. However, the last time I saw this movie Reagan was in the White House, so my memory might be fuzzy. My review is written with high hopes. This is one of those movies that helped to bring me through puberty with ease, and for that I will be forever grateful. But, I can not advise that you see this movie. While to a little kid this movie is hot stuff, but to adults, it is a relic of 1980's cinema. Today's cynical audience will look down their nose at this movie and smirk and wonder how young members of Gen-X ever lived through the 80s. But, to us aged punk kids, this movie is a treasured memory that is best left in the back of the video store where it belongs.

Let us hope that there will never be a DVD release of this movie, because if there was then people's decent over this movie would grow even louder.

The kindest thing I can say about this utterly dismal, none-more-eighties (sunglasses indoors, hawaiian shirts, mullet hairstyles, rolled-up jacket sleeves...it's all there) teen raunch flick is that the film does boast an impressive central location in the shape of the hotel itself. Apart from that, it's a mess. It's as if the worst elements of the Porky's series, the Police Academy series after the departure of Steve Guttenberg, any John Hughes film made after Sixteen Candles and the Naked Gun team on an off day were left on a shelf to rot, then some bored studio drudge stapled them all together and the result was Screwball Hotel. It's a crying shame, not to mention a scandal, that the original CREEPSHOW has yet to see a British DVD release, but this dreck is taking up valuable space on the shelves of your local Virgin megastore. And it's not even a budget release...

Its hard to pin down the beginning or end of any Era, but this film pretty much signals the end of the Glam 80's, imploding under the weight of Big Hair, Padded Shoulders and the plastic emotions of the decade of sleazy innocence. Every cliché' of the age seems gathered together for dismal effect. It seems to be a parody of itself, as if realising that the decade it portrays is already in decay.

Not that any insight was in the mind of anyone making this garbage.

In a mild touch of irony, Kelly Monteith was, surprisingly, really big in the UK with his BBC2 show in the early 80's. His mixture of skits and talking to the audience were cutting edge comedy at the time. Breaking the 'Fourth Wall' ushered in a new comedic style.

And this is how it ended. Who would have figured Mr Monteith as the barometer of a cultural Era?

I can't in good conscience give "Screwball Hotel" more than four stars but it is still a must see. Buried throughout what is otherwise a moronic exercise in low-budget torture are short vignettes between the hotel manager and his secretary Miss Walsh (Laurah Guillen). These inspired scenes feature their active costume and fantasy sex life, these assorted scenes are inventive and hilarious enough to belong in a much better film. Despite their almost nonstop silly coupling, the two characters never call each other by their first names; maintaining the executive - secretary formality as they do erotic takeoffs on "The Wizard of Oz", "Star Trek", "Raider of the Lost Ark", "Snow White", and "Jaws". At one point a bellboy dresses up in a frog costume hoping to make it with Miss Walsh.

Miss Walsh is arguably the most erotic character in movie history (Guillen being an irresistible combination of cute face, killer body, and self-knowing whimsy). She surprisingly upstages Penthouse Pet-Of-The-Year Corinne Alphen (whose scenes are the only other ones worth watching) in the sizzle department.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.