Hitch Magazine | Toga Party

Bikini Med School and Bikini House Calls look like they’re cobbled together from some really awful made-for-cable softcore porn series. In both, various sexual couplings occur in a frat-house room among a stock group of med students while downstairs, horse-faced strippers who don’t strip dance to excruciating butt-rock. Occasion-ally, the films cut to old stock footage of medical whatnot, sometimes in the middle of a line, for no discernible reason. They share the same group of unappealing characters.

In Med School, two guys bet each other $100 that they can trick a girl into sex. This being a film with Bikini in the title, they succeed. Writer/director (to use the terms lightly) Michael Paul Girard loves this plot so much that he repeats it in the second half. House Calls is more of the same, except with a fantasy sequence, more panty-sniffing, a fake orgasm contest and a prank pulled with itching powder.

Girard is also to blame for Illegal Affairs and A Brief Affair, which offer the same sophomoric episodic romps where the comedy is as simulated as the sex, but set in a law firm so that, as one friend put it, the characters can “go to court and fuck on desks.” B-movie regulars Jay Richardson and Monique Parent star, perhaps regrettably, in both.

Four college seniors (including Dennis Quaid with a butt cut) on the verge of graduation dread the harsh reality of the real world that awaits them. But mostly they’ll miss their live-in nympho housekeeper (Three’s Company’s Priscilla Barnes) with whom they all have sex and who never says a word. So the enterprising young men combine their love of casual sex and their desire to avoid work by falsely receiving a grant to conduct a research study of the sexual life of liberated college girls.

It’s not as sleazy as it all sounds, particularly because halfway through, it shifts into a satire on big business and suddenly, there’s nary an exposed boob in sight. In fact, it ceases to become a cheap sex comedy entirely – you’ll wish a character would gain the power of telekinesis or something so things could get back on track.

Near-albino Brian Kerwin (clearly the Jeff Daniels of his day) has to join a military academy after getting expelled from high school. The year is 1967, where there’s a long-haired hitchhiker on every corner and cars have bumper stickers reading “GOD IS ALIVE … AND HE LIVES IN A SUGAR CUBE!”

Kerwin and his roomies smoke banana peels, dump manure confetti on a gym full of dancers and meet a hippie artist with a fake parrot on his shoulder wearing a button that reads “STONED” (the parrot, not the artist). One of his roommates is traumatized by trains, so he tries to derail one by smearing pats of butter on the tracks. Stephen Furst (Flounder from Animal House) sits on a toilet filled with gasoline and it explodes. While home for Christmas vacation, Kerwin throws flaming tires from a moving car with old elfin pal David Caruso and his mom cooks their family dog in her new microwave.

If you’re looking for a story arc, don’t; you have to have a story first. The soundtrack boasts actual hits from The Box Tops, Steppenwolf, The Mamas and the Papas, The Rascal and Booker T, among others. Getting Wasted is a framework rather than an actual movie, but then most movies don’t have a grade-school drug dealer, now, do they?

Kinda cute and kinda slutty, Melissa is on the verge of turning 16. Yes, all girls become women, but this brunette small-town schoolgirl is unique because every man she starts getting frisky with ends up getting stabbed to death. Not that it’s that big of a loss – the first victim introduces himself to her with the immortal pick-up line, “Name’s Johnny. This here’s my truck.”

Bo Hopkins is the sheriff trying to get to the bottom of it all, while the various redneck townspeople are quick to point the blame at those darned Injuns. Melissa, meanwhile, seems oblivious, taking long showers and staring at lingeried self in the mirror.

Sweet Sixteen may not be your ordinary slasher movie, timed as it to puberty and all, but it’s less than extraordinary. Its last shot is spooky and unsettling, but not as disturbing as the director’s apparent fascination with his movie’s jailbait.

At Harrad College, they preach and practice free love. Boys and girls are paired up as roommates, encouraged to plug away and attend morning yoga sessions in the nude. This is all fine and dandy if you’re a smooth and suave ladies’ man like Don Johnson, wearing a beret and neckerchief, but a little daunting if you’re, well, Bruno Kirby.

But just as Bruno warms up and gains confidence with his skinny, sexy roomie (Eight Is Enough’s Laurie Walters), Don finds out – thanks to his homely partner, with whom he bonds over pot farming – is that love can be – goshdarnit! – so complicated. As heads of the school, James Whitmore and Tippi Hedren (later to become Johnson’s mom-in-law, lending their sex-charged scenes with a new level of creepiness) are top-billed, but they’re hardly in it, to make room for all the young wangs and thatches.

Certainly this an embarrassment to all involved, which makes it top-notch, unintentionally hilarious entertainment for you and me. No doubt about it, it tops director Ted Post’s nuclear-mutant-and-monkey movie (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) for sheer weirdness. And about the only thing more unsettling than seeing Fred Willard in a movie like this is knowing that Marty Allen did the sequel. Zoom, zoom, zoom!

The totally obscure broad ‘n’ bawdy comedy Toga Party begins not at a toga party, but on a farm, where Purvis, an easygoing guy with a ‘fro, spends his days strumming the guitar, boning Betty Jo in the barn and dreaming of becoming a singer. One day, he up and decides to go to New York in search of stardom, so he does.

Upon arrival, he roams the streets, not in search of a toga party, but a club that’ll let him play. No one will. On a chance meeting, he is discovered by a sleazy, two-bit agent named Suzy Starmonger. She books him not at a toga party, but at an obnoxious bar where a pie fight is liable to break out at the drop of someone’s pants.

Now redubbed “Pelvis” because of his vocal likening to the King and because of his large member, Purvis becomes a minor star singing hits like “Nazi Girl,” “I Know a Man Who Screwed a Chicken,” “Suck My Way to the Top” and “Maria, My Little Wetback.” He also gets mixed up in hard drugs and loose woman.

Other than a spoof of the infamous crying-Indian litter PSA, there’s nothing really funny about Toga Party, but it’s fairly painless. In case you hadn’t figured it out by now, at no time does anyone go to (or even talk about) a toga party.

This collegiate comedy is plotless, witless and laughless, yet manages to slide by on its own ineptness. It follows the naïve small-town virgin Jane as she enrolls in college and gets boy advice from her slutty roommate. They go to group dates at a drive-in showing X-rated nun movies, at a roller disco and at a frat party with strippers and a band so bad, they might as well have hired Chuck Mangione.

Meanwhile, the oversexed corpulent professor (played by a guy with the colon-clearing name of B.M. Culpepper) imagines his female students naked, like when he pretends one comely coed strips as he quizzes her on world capitals. He also peeps in the girls’ showers until they realize his game and the girls parade topless wearing pig masks to fuck up his head. I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.




	The Unofficial Brentwood Communications 10-Movie DVD Sets Shrine and Info Center

			TOGA PARTY (2002) Reviewed: Bikini Med School Bikini House Calls Illegal Affairs A Brief Affair The Seniors Getting Wasted Sweet Sixteen The Harrad Experiment Toga Party Incoming Freshmen


			BUY ME!

	Bikini Med School (1994) * Bikini House Calls (1994) * Illegal Affairs (1996) * A Brief Affair (1996) * Bikini Med School and Bikini House Calls look like they’re cobbled together from some really awful made-for-cable softcore porn series. In both, various sexual couplings occur in a frat-house room among a stock group of med students while downstairs, horse-faced strippers who don’t strip dance to excruciating butt-rock. Occasion-ally, the films cut to old stock footage of medical whatnot, sometimes in the middle of a line, for no discernible reason. They share the same group of unappealing characters. In Med School, two guys bet each other $100 that they can trick a girl into sex. This being a film with Bikini in the title, they succeed. Writer/director (to use the terms lightly) Michael Paul Girard loves this plot so much that he repeats it in the second half. House Calls is more of the same, except with a fantasy sequence, more panty-sniffing, a fake orgasm contest and a prank pulled with itching powder. Girard is also to blame for Illegal Affairs and A Brief Affair, which offer the same sophomoric episodic romps where the comedy is as simulated as the sex, but set in a law firm so that, as one friend put it, the characters can “go to court and fuck on desks.” B-movie regulars Jay Richardson and Monique Parent star, perhaps regrettably, in both. The Seniors (1978) * Four college seniors (including Dennis Quaid with a butt cut) on the verge of graduation dread the harsh reality of the real world that awaits them. But mostly they’ll miss their live-in nympho housekeeper (Three’s Company’s Priscilla Barnes) with whom they all have sex and who never says a word. So the enterprising young men combine their love of casual sex and their desire to avoid work by falsely receiving a grant to conduct a research study of the sexual life of liberated college girls. It’s not as sleazy as it all sounds, particularly because halfway through, it shifts into a satire on big business and suddenly, there’s nary an exposed boob in sight. In fact, it ceases to become a cheap sex comedy entirely – you’ll wish a character would gain the power of telekinesis or something so things could get back on track. Getting Wasted (1980) * Near-albino Brian Kerwin (clearly the Jeff Daniels of his day) has to join a military academy after getting expelled from high school. The year is 1967, where there’s a long-haired hitchhiker on every corner and cars have bumper stickers reading “GOD IS ALIVE … AND HE LIVES IN A SUGAR CUBE!” Kerwin and his roomies smoke banana peels, dump manure confetti on a gym full of dancers and meet a hippie artist with a fake parrot on his shoulder wearing a button that reads “STONED” (the parrot, not the artist). One of his roommates is traumatized by trains, so he tries to derail one by smearing pats of butter on the tracks. Stephen Furst (Flounder from Animal House) sits on a toilet filled with gasoline and it explodes. While home for Christmas vacation, Kerwin throws flaming tires from a moving car with old elfin pal David Caruso and his mom cooks their family dog in her new microwave. If you’re looking for a story arc, don’t; you have to have a story first. The soundtrack boasts actual hits from The Box Tops, Steppenwolf, The Mamas and the Papas, The Rascal and Booker T, among others. Getting Wasted is a framework rather than an actual movie, but then most movies don’t have a grade-school drug dealer, now, do they? Sweet Sixteen (1982) Kinda cute and kinda slutty, Melissa is on the verge of turning 16. Yes, all girls become women, but this brunette small-town schoolgirl is unique because every man she starts getting frisky with ends up getting stabbed to death. Not that it’s that big of a loss – the first victim introduces himself to her with the immortal pick-up line, “Name’s Johnny. This here’s my truck.” Bo Hopkins is the sheriff trying to get to the bottom of it all, while the various redneck townspeople are quick to point the blame at those darned Injuns. Melissa, meanwhile, seems oblivious, taking long showers and staring at lingeried self in the mirror. Sweet Sixteen may not be your ordinary slasher movie, timed as it to puberty and all, but it’s less than extraordinary. Its last shot is spooky and unsettling, but not as disturbing as the director’s apparent fascination with his movie’s jailbait. The Harrad Experiment (1973) At Harrad College, they preach and practice free love. Boys and girls are paired up as roommates, encouraged to plug away and attend morning yoga sessions in the nude. This is all fine and dandy if you’re a smooth and suave ladies’ man like Don Johnson, wearing a beret and neckerchief, but a little daunting if you’re, well, Bruno Kirby. But just as Bruno warms up and gains confidence with his skinny, sexy roomie (Eight Is Enough’s Laurie Walters), Don finds out – thanks to his homely partner, with whom he bonds over pot farming – is that love can be – goshdarnit! – so complicated. As heads of the school, James Whitmore and Tippi Hedren (later to become Johnson’s mom-in-law, lending their sex-charged scenes with a new level of creepiness) are top-billed, but they’re hardly in it, to make room for all the young wangs and thatches. Certainly this an embarrassment to all involved, which makes it top-notch, unintentionally hilarious entertainment for you and me. No doubt about it, it tops director Ted Post’s nuclear-mutant-and-monkey movie (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) for sheer weirdness. And about the only thing more unsettling than seeing Fred Willard in a movie like this is knowing that Marty Allen did the sequel. Zoom, zoom, zoom! Toga Party (1979) * The totally obscure broad ‘n’ bawdy comedy Toga Party begins not at a toga party, but on a farm, where Purvis, an easygoing guy with a ‘fro, spends his days strumming the guitar, boning Betty Jo in the barn and dreaming of becoming a singer. One day, he up and decides to go to New York in search of stardom, so he does. Upon arrival, he roams the streets, not in search of a toga party, but a club that’ll let him play. No one will. On a chance meeting, he is discovered by a sleazy, two-bit agent named Suzy Starmonger. She books him not at a toga party, but at an obnoxious bar where a pie fight is liable to break out at the drop of someone’s pants. Now redubbed “Pelvis” because of his vocal likening to the King and because of his large member, Purvis becomes a minor star singing hits like “Nazi Girl,” “I Know a Man Who Screwed a Chicken,” “Suck My Way to the Top” and “Maria, My Little Wetback.” He also gets mixed up in hard drugs and loose woman. Other than a spoof of the infamous crying-Indian litter PSA, there’s nothing really funny about Toga Party, but it’s fairly painless. In case you hadn’t figured it out by now, at no time does anyone go to (or even talk about) a toga party. Incoming Freshmen (1979) *** This collegiate comedy is plotless, witless and laughless, yet manages to slide by on its own ineptness. It follows the naïve small-town virgin Jane as she enrolls in college and gets boy advice from her slutty roommate. They go to group dates at a drive-in showing X-rated nun movies, at a roller disco and at a frat party with strippers and a band so bad, they might as well have hired Chuck Mangione. Meanwhile, the oversexed corpulent professor (played by a guy with the colon-clearing name of B.M. Culpepper) imagines his female students naked, like when he pretends one comely coed strips as he quizzes her on world capitals. He also peeps in the girls’ showers until they realize his game and the girls parade topless wearing pig masks to fuck up his head. I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.