The First Turn-On!!

My interest in this film was purely as a fan of Vincent D'Onofrio..and this is his first ever movie made at the tender age of twenty four. His role is small however, but his character is actually quite funny. He plays a psychotic,brainless teenager called Lobotomy..and oh, how his acting improved over the years! The film itself is a carry on movie meets Airplane! lots of silly humour and innuendo. It's set at a kids summer camp with dubious members of staff and centres around four teens and a dizzy blonde staff members stories of their first seductions..it is funny in parts but also very silly. It's not a bad film, just a piece of inane fluff.

Even though this movie is an "80s" movie, it still stands out a bit on its own. It's a raunchy sexually charged teen flick that has grown adults who are hard pressed to pass as teenagers, well, acting as teenagers.

This flick is a mindless, offbeat teen entertainment sprinkled with sexual stimulus throughout. It does what it does. They don't hand out Academy awards for this type of movie.

This was probable the 1st rated R movie I ever saw. I was about 9 years old at the time. And cable tv then had a button on the remote that would unscramble whichever 'Pay Per View' movie you wanted to see and it charge your monthly bill. However, I had discovered if you didn't watch more than 30 seconds at a time, you would never get charged. This movie had me coming back in 30 second bits until I saw it all. My only complaint was how they got out of the cave. Just when things were getting the most interesting. I the movie could have been 5 minutes longer at the end.

I see a few reviewers mentioning how ugly the women are in the movie. Not only do I disagree, I find that just an excuse to be mean to people. These women rock it on camera. This movie holds a special place in my erotic comedy heart. And I come back to it from time to time. I don't do that with a lot of movies.

One of Troma's first entries in the teen sex comedy genre, it is average at best. "The First Turn On!!" is about a bunch of idiot teen campers and a female counselor get stuck in a cave and "describe" their first sexual encounters.

This is a pretty subaverage fare for even Troma films. In the world of teenage sex romps it pales in comparison to recent films such as "American Pie" and "Road Trip."

There are some highlights in this film. This was a first film for Vincent D'Onofrio (Full Metal Jacket, Feeling Minnesota, Men in Black, Steal this Movie!) as a fat loser and a funny cameo by comedian and all-around nice guy Rondell Sheridan as a gang member.

The real gem of this movie is the sound track from the seminal new wave band "Shrapnel" featuring some of their best (and unreleased) stuff. Hearing the song "Sleep Over" and the goofy performances by Sheridan and D'Onofrio are worth giving this film a watch on cable or a $1.00 rental (but not much else).

The First Turn-On!! (must have the two exclamation points there because, hey, more stuff on the poster!!) is a sex-romp where we get to see the inside scoops on what the "first time" was like for a few ass-wipes and two stuck up chicks (to speak in Beavis & Butt-head tongue), and they all beef up their stories that they tell in the cave after an avalanche makes the cave impenetrable... he-he, impenetrable, is that a funny? Well, no, on to the movie itself, one of the early collaborations between Troma founder/bad-taste pioneers Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman, who share producer/director credits here.

Their game, if one can't tell from their other movies, is intentionally hitting the lowest common denominator. They do have a tongue-in-cheek through most of it- that is when the misogyny doesn't scream out like a young lady's first or almost orgasm- and at least they're not trying to be offensive... actually, no, that's a lie. If you got offended by this, they won half the battle (and if you paid for the whole DVD- as opposed to, with some wit, getting it off of Netflix instant-view, they won the other half).

I would like to try to look deeper into some of the psychological ramifications of what the campers and camp-leader with the frizzy 80's hair and wide blue eyes go into, but does it matter? Whenever Kaufman and Herz try to get on with a story it makes so many detours it threatens to jump off a cliff with two boobs in your face. This said, throughout the raucous and stupid and juvenile and just flat-out gross and 11-year old humor wedged into a very-R-rated sex comedy, I actually did laugh at a few lines like "This would be easier than (bleeping) a tomato", and there were a few sight gags that did make me chuckle loudly. I could probably count those times on one hand. And I guess there are some nice bosoms, to note once again. The rest of it is obnoxious crap-comedy, the kind where you roll your eyes or just sit in momentary stunned silence and go "really, you had to go there?

It's a Porky's knock-off at camp that unfortunately doesn't go far enough to anticipate 127 Hours. Now if they had to cut off some genitals to stay alive (mostly testicles) it might be a better night out.

I used to hate 80's teen movies (it was bad enough actually BEING a teenager in the 80's without having to watch a bunch of crappy movies about it). But now a warm glow of nostalgia (or incipient senility) has set in and I kind of like some of them. I still don't care for some of the more famous ones ("The Breakfast Club", "Dirty Dancing", etc.), but I like some of the ones that are kind of realistic (if somewhat depressing) like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and "The Last American Virgin", or, on the other hand, films like this one that are so ridiculous you can't take them seriously at all. Since this film was made by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz of Troma, it is of course very self-consciously campy (if not quite as much as their more famous "Toxic Avenger" series). It takes place at a strange camp where the "campers" all seem to be in their early twenties. A counselor and four "campers" get trapped in a cave and decide to pass the time by telling each other stories of their "first time".

The stories are all REALLY dumb, but this movie uses an interesting device where the flashbacks on screen often contradict the story the character is telling. I remember a few years later a mainstream critic practically wetting himself when overrated film genius Steven Sodeberg did this in "sex, lies and videotape". Of course, this device is much more incompetently rendered here and a plot twist near the end really makes hash of it (but then again "sex, lies, and videotape" doesn't end in a big orgy like this one does).

But I'm sure nobody but me cares about any of this so let's get to the two most important things--the "T", and of course, the "A". There's plenty of it here naturally as in any Troma movie. Most of the girls, however, aren't stunningly attractive except for Sheila Kennedy, who was a former Penthouse Pet and years later appeared in the TV "reality dreck "Big Brother" (and I don't which of these is the skeleton in her closet). This movie is definitely a skeleton in the closet of Emmy and Academy Award-nominated actor Vincent D'nofrio. I certainly don't agree with Lloyd Kaufman's introductory comment that Sheila Kennedy is better in this than D'nofrio was in "Full Metal Jacket", but she's better than he is in this movie (of course, she doesn't have to stretch herself too much since she's actually playing a Penthouse Pet here). Anyway, those that enjoy this kind of celebrity early-career embarrassment will certainly enjoy Vince here.