Welcome back to Softcore Erotica month at New Adventures in Netflix. The ancient art of the sex comedy is a tricky one, forcing filmmakers to delicately balance nudity, sex, comedy and an actual storyline. For every classic softcore sex romp like The Bikini Carwash Company and Test Tube Teens from the Year 2000 there are dozens of limp capers like Virgin High. Alas, neither of those genuinely funny, genuinely sexy Skinemax classics are available on Netflix at all, streaming nor otherwise, so we’re stuck with Virgin High instead. New Adventures in Netflix will just have to be a little less adventurous this week, I guess…
Virgin High hails from an era in which date rape was apparently kinda funny: the film opens with our ‘hero,’ Jerry (Richard Gabai) – one of the most unlikable main characters in film history – on a date with his girlfriend, Christy (Tracy Dali) who by her very nature as a human being is too good for this guy. Christy’s fallen asleep in the car, which Jerry naturally takes as an invitation to pull the buttons off of her blouse and inexpertly rip open her bra. When Christy awakens and protests, Jerry’s counter-argument is that she doesn’t want to have sex with him, so of course he tried to date rape her. He takes her home three hours after her curfew, having pulled the “my watch stopped” trick (with a digital watch, no less). Christy’s parents are up waiting for her, and no matter how much she protests, the fact that her blouse is ripped open and her boobs are hanging out earns her a one way ticket to Catholic boarding school, aka ‘Virgin High.’
Jerry and his cronies Theo (Kent Burden) and Zoomer (Jeff Bowser, and yes his character’s name is ‘Zoomer’) scheme to rescue Christy from her oppressively Catholic environment. Their endgame is never clear: what exactly are they going to do with her once they enact their daring escape? She can’t go home, she’s still in school, plus she hates Jerry’s guts… as well she should. Our ‘heroes’ spend huge chunks of the film in the parking lot of Virgin High coming up with elaborate (read: dull) plans to sneak inside and meet all the repressed young hotties, never noticing the fact that the parking lot itself is filled with the attractive uniformed students of said academy. They could simply say ‘Hello.’ It’s a plot hole, but that’s not the kind of hole that Virgin High is interested in.
Richard Gabai also directed the film, which has a manic energy to it that can’t be denied no matter how much you beg and plead. Gabai’s performance in particular appears caffeine-fueled: he’s in constant motion, making ‘funny’ gestures and prancing around each scene like he always has to be the center of attention, even when he’s supposed to be sneaking around. There are funny bits here and there, usually limited to supporting characters like Christy’s dad, played by the old Batman TV show’s Burt Ward. I also like how Virgin High only has one Catholic-looking statue, which they apparently cart around into whichever room a film crew happens to be shooting in at the moment, and the 8-bit NES musical score has a certain charm.
Christy’s plot is the better one, having to deal with an evil resident advisor played by Linnea Quigley (who also appeared in the infinitely superior Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama). She schemes with the jocky and generally ineffectual school security guard to get revenge on Christy for… I dunno, being Christy I guess. She’s just kind of a bitch. But at least she's cool enough to get the Mother Superior to approve a half-naked carwash fundraiser. Look out for Knocked Up star Leslie Mann’s first film role, correctly identifying a squiggle as a squiggle. And no, that’s not a metaphor.
As far as sex goes, with a title like Virgin High you’d think we’d get a lot of it, but aside from a few jokey dominatrix gags with Christy’s parents and a quartet of bare breasts there isn’t much to work with. Virgin High doesn’t have the wherewithal to be a proper sexcapade like The Swinging Cheerleaders, it’s too busy being a broad comedy about relatively chaste broads. But Virgin High rubs me the wrong way regardless of its inability to make the viewers rub themselves the right way. Like American Pie this film treats sexual intercourse like a commodity, to be stolen or cajoled away from its uptight keepers – girls – rather than shared amongst all the characters in the spirit of goofy fun that this sort of comedy promises. My kingdom for a genuinely light-hearted romp like Ski School instead…
Virgin High inexplicably spawned a sequel: Hot Under the Collar, released the following year. In that film Jerry's moved on to another unobtainable woman and attempts to hypnotize her into intercourse, only to accidentally turn her into a nun. You're all class, Jerry. It’s also available on Netflix Instant Streaming, but we won’t be reviewing it. We have actual softcore erotica to watch. Virgin High is the kind of movie that used to air on USA Up All Night, not our beloved Skinemax. It’s a waste of time, and we’re sorry. We’ll be back with some proper softcore next week, just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Watch Virgin High right now via Netflix Instant Streaming!
