Summer School Teachers

Two of the COVER GIRL MODELS, blonde Pat Anderson and brunette Rhonda Hopkins, appear in what's more a hands-on Roger Corman production beyond mere distribution where wife Julie Corman and director Barbara Peeters have HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD starlet Candice Rialson (the epitome of a perfect-blonde but as cool and tough as any dude) and her two lovely friends going from farmland America to sunny Southern California to become the titular SUMMER SCHOOL TEACHERS, a kind of spiritual remake of Corman's THE STUDENT TEACHERS...

Hopkins turns in the most intense performance, not as naturally inclined to instructing teenagers until having an affair with the campus James Dean, who (caught in a peripheral crime-plot to up the suspenseful ante) looks so much her late-twenties age, the taboo subject matter doesn't matter...

Meanwhile, Pat Anderson meets a famously reclusive, ultimately flaky rock singer Michael Greer (cult actor from MESSIAH OF EVIL and THE GAY DECEIVERS) before a kind of bickering, opposites attract relationship with conceited but affable teacher Grainger Hines...

And, while dating an awkwardly shy science-teacher, first-billed Candice Rialson has the least screen-time yet holds the centralized story-line as the campus coach of what's a progressive girls' football team, objected to by sexist coach Dick Miller... seeming like it could have been its own separate movie...

Particularly when spunky-cute high-school girls Barbara Peil and Ka-Ron Sowell Brown do costume-wearing sneak-attacks on the boy's team and coach... befitting what female director Peeters intended as an expose of hot (sometimes naked) chicks also flirting with the feminist movement...

Which works pretty well since SUMMER SCHOOL TEACHERS strays from the usual drive-in-cinema elements where the actresses are fodder to sexual escapades - in what's ultimately more of a summertime hangout flick involving gorgeous female instructors than a risque exploitation exploiting them.

Three ridiculously sexy girls go from Iowa to Los Angeles to teach summer school in this quasi-sequel to "The Student Teachers". But whereas the first film was marginally realistic and believable, this is completely absurd, but a lot more fun. The students at this school all look like they flunked several years (maybe even a decade or so) and the female students seem to have chosen summer school because the flexible hours wouldn't interfere with their regular gigs as pole dancers. (The girls' PE class, for instance, is first introduced with a close-up pan of their gyrating, barely clad asses). And why would they teach subjects like PE and art in summer school, anyway? What kind of idiot would flunk those subjects? (I actually once taught math in summer school and it was NOTHING like this, although perhaps that was a good thing because I might be in jail right now if all the female students had looked like this).

In typical Corman/New World fashion there is, of course, some amount of serious plot-lines and half-assed feminism thrown in with the gratuitous T and A. One teacher falls in love with a delinquent male student (which even if you're a young, sexy female, is a professional and legal no-no). The art teacher meanwhile inadvertently gets involved in nude modeling. And in the most ridiculous story Candice Rialson tries to start a girls' football team against the wishes of Dick Miller's sexist football coach.

The female director of this Barbara Peeters would go on to direct the cult classic "Humanoids of the Deep", which she complained Corman later went back and salted with even more gratuitous female nudity. Well, I wish he'd done that with this one too, at least with regards the mouth-wateringly luscious Candice Rialson. Seeing a movie like this without regular nude scenes from her is like watching a Laker game with Kobe Bryant sitting on the bench. Seriously though, Rialson was a very appealing low-budget actress and I was sad to learn she died back in 2006. Dick Miller is an institution in Corman movies going all the way back to "A Bucket of Blood", but he actually gets a fairly large and well-developed part here as a macho, sexist coach (at, um, a summer school). This movie has turned up recently on a couple of legitimate DVD collections, so it might just be worth checking out.

Roger Corman's wife Julie produces a movie in which a bunch of good-looking babes from Iowa go to California to be teachers, and a bunch of silly things happen. "Summer School Teachers" definitely comes across as a movie made to appeal to the women's liberation movement. Mostly it's all titillation. My favorite part was the scene where the old women are listening to one of the teachers converse with a man, misinterpreting the entire conversation. Whatever the movie's main intention was, it comes out as nice brainless fun, and the final scene affirms that the 1950s mores are LONG gone! The fun lives forever!

PS: Dick Miller (the sexist PE teacher) frequently appeared in Roger Corman's movies, and more recently appears a lot in Joe Dante's movies.