Porky's (1981)
Directed by Bob Clark
In 1954 Florida, a group of high school boys head to a strip club in the Everglades in an attempt to lose their collective virginity. When the club's owner and his sheriff brother swindle them out of their money and embarrass them, the boys plan revenge.
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What critics compared Porky's to
Along with some unconscious echoes of the similarly crude Tenacious D In: The Pick Of Destiny, the film embraces the edgier comedies of the early 1980s like National Lampoon's Animal House and Porky's (especially with the vintage Columbia logo that opens the film, and the hilariously retro title sequence), as well as Apatow's fabulous (if little-seen) 1999 TV high-school drama 'Freaks And Geeks'.
Because of this, high school comedies have been a major force in the film world since their propagation in the 1980s on the back of John Hughes, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Porky’s.”
The fact that the film was directed by a woman, was written by four women, and is told entirely from the perspective of two female characters immediately sets it apart from the typical teen comedy, but what is curious is how closely it hews to the conventions of a genre made famous by adolescent male hijinks—from American Graffiti (1973), to Porky’s (1982), to American Pie (1999), and Superbad (2007), the latter of which it most closely resembles in plot, tone, and sentiment.
Have we time-traveled back to the 1980s, when movies like Porky's reigned supreme?
During the 1980s, teen movies predominantly splintered into two categories: John Hughes "dramadies" and the raunch of Porky's.
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But the 1980s began with giggly sex comedies like Porky’s and Fast Times, and then John Hughes took over, imbuing high school narratives with an earnest kindness and “be yourself” messaging.
However, unlike other filmmakers who saw the world of teenagers as an excuse to exploit the adolescent obsessions with booze, drugs, and sex, Hughes was fascinated by the complex social and emotional terrain of middle-class teenagerdom, and he treated his characters with a degree of sympathy and good-natured humor that was largely absent from a genre glutted with movies like Private Lesson (1981), Porky’s (1981), and Zapped (1982).