Ils ne pensent qu'à ça

Gee I just watched this on DVD the other day.And I'm not sure if "god" would allow a ghost to linger around college but c'mon guy it's a silly little T&A sex comedy.Yes I know it's not a great film but it's a typical 80's party flick. Sometimes the serious artistic merit of a film has to be overlooked.If School Spirit was meant to be taken seriously as a look at reincarnation that's one thing but really it's not.But obviously the producers were tapping into the teenage boy market that made movies like Hardbodies,Porky's,Losin' It and other 80's staples successful.School Spirit will give you a chuckle and an eyeful of gratuitous female nudity,nothing more nothing less.And some days that's all you want to watch.

"School Spirit" is an anonymous and by now largely forgotten mid-80's comedy that obviously just got made in order to cash in on the contemporary popular trend of sleazy and vulgar high school/college comedies. Bob Clark's "Porky's" kick-started the trend and copious replicas were released within the next couple of years, like "Zapped!", "Screwballs", "Revenge of the Nerds", "Loose Screws" and "Fraternity Vacation". These movies invariably revolve on dim-witted and usually nerdy kids with exclusively sex on their minds and became big box office hits because they occasionally feature naked boobs and perfectly shaped butt-cheeks. They're fun and completely harmless for as long as they last, but even more forgettable and dumb.

"School Spirit" tried to add a supernatural element to the generally straightforward concept of high-school comedy, which is presumably why it failed and ended up in B-movie oblivion. Billy Batson, the lead scoundrel of the bizarrely named Lavatoire College, is about to score (in the principal's office of all places) with the ambitious geek-girl Judith, but forgot to bring a protective rubber. In his haste of purchasing one, Billy causes a car accident and dies on the operating table. His guide towards the bright white light, however, is his perverted old uncle Pinky and he isn't in too much of a hurry. Billy grants himself one more day to fornicate with Judith, but instead there's plentiful of other stuff going on. Billy and his wild-partying buddies are preparing for "Hog-Day" and he encounters true love in the shape of French sponsor of the school.

The main purpose of a film like "School Spirit" becomes apparent not long after the supposedly deceased Billy discovers that he now has the ability to make himself invisible. What's the first thing a young and hormone-driven stud does with a powerful gift like that? That's right, he sneaks into the girls dormitory's bathroom and extendedly observes how they shower and rub soap all over their breasts. The clichés just keep on coming in this film (nerd kids discover the art of partying, two sworn best friends falling in love, the "evil" principal going bonkers, etc) and the dialogs are really dumb, but it's all so innocent and served with great enthusiasm that you simply cannot hate the film. The character of Pinky Batson is an old pervert, though, and if the film had been made in this day and age, his character undoubtedly would have been played by a much younger actor. There's a pretty immoral and deviant sequence in which the sleazy senior exposes a girl's breasts and butt while she's sleeping. I really don't see that happening in movies nowadays and righteously so. Other than that, you know exactly what to expect from this type of cheap and unpretentious 80's comedies: horrendous rock music soundtrack, badly acting but good-looking young people, a terribly forced happy ending and … T&A, of course!

I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't watch 80's "Porky's"-style comedies if you have a low tolerance for head-slapping stupidity. But this movies does REALLY push the envelope. A horny college student (Tom Nolan) dies in an auto accident while rushing to buy condoms to seal the deal with a sexy co-ed (this could be a commendable "safe sex" message, but since this event results in the rest of this movie, I'm not so sure). Through some technicality, the guy is allowed to remain on Earth as a "ghost", but a strange kind of ghost that everybody can see except when he taps the top of his head and becomes invisible, but apparently still corporeal. Thus, this ends up being a re-tread of "The Man who Wasn't There" (a much more famous movie in the 80's but one not yet on DVD). So does he use his new powers to sneak into the showers at the sorority? But, of course. After that though the movie turns into a "Caddyshack" snobs vs. slobs thing as the dead guy and his friends are celebrating their annual "Hog Day" party while uptight the school president (Larry "MASH" Linville,who could play this role in his sleep and pretty much does) tries to get a financial endowment from a wealthy French woman.

But let's get to the two most important things--the "T", and of course, the "A". There's generous helpings of both from anonymous actresses in the shower and "Hog Day" slip-n-slide scenes. The lead actresses all stay mostly dressed, however, including Elizabeth Foxx as the grade-grubbing co-ed our hero is initially trying to score with and Marta Kober as Linville's daughter. (Kober, who nicely fills out an 80's bikini here, is perhaps most famous for "Friday the 13th Part II" where she becomes the first of only two female characters in the entire series to actually be killed by Jason DURING sex). I can't complain too much about this aspect of the film, and I genuinely liked the punk-style band that was playing during the "Hog Day" party (usually these type of movies are lousy with horrid music).

I originally saw this on "USA Up All Night" nearly twenty years ago and I must have been especially drunk that night because they would have cut out all the T and A, and so the band at the end at the end would have been about the ONLY thing this had going for it.

When horny Young college student Tom Nolan gets hit by a truck he ends up brain dead in hospital with a hard on, but is able to return to life for a 24-hour period so he can try and get laid in this non sensical and stupid comedy. It's just an excuse for him to spy on naked college girls in a shower room and the entire movie is full of lame jokes. It was one of the first films from Roger Corman's new distribution company, Concorde Pictures Inc, which he formed after selling New World Pictures and features copious amounts of female nudity but no hot sex scenes or any remotely funny performances. It had some potential to riff on the horror genre, but the fact that the lead character is dead and a ghost has almost no bearing on the plot.

I truly enjoyed this movie, no pretension and tons of cheesy, horn-ball insanity. The aspect of this movie that really made it for me, that put it over the top, is that our protagonist is so horned-up and crazy to get some action that not only is his corpse clutching the condom that he died getting, but he actually comes back from the dead (!) and steals the condom from his cadaver's grasp. THAT is dedication to getting yr freak on.

Check it out if you like the requisite teen / college sex-comedy fodder from the eighties ( private school, porky's, up the creek, summer school, etc. )