The top movie of 1982, by a wide margin, was “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” Steven Spielberg’s fantasy about a group of boys who try to get an alien back to outer space. Below it, at No. 5, was “Porky’s,” about a group of boys who try to have a lot of sex. It coasted on the pre-J.F.K.-assassination nostalgia that made huge hits of “American Graffiti,” a decade earlier, and “Animal House,” five years after that. But “Porky’s” wasn’t innocent, or for that matter, nostalgic. All that the boys long for is girls — to talk to, sure, but mostly to peep at, ogle and harass.

The gang visits a sex shack in the sticks, where at least six of them plan to take turns with the same prostitute. They scheme their way into a roadhouse nudie bar (Porky’s) so that one guy — Pee Wee — can more expediently lose his virginity. And a horny male gym teacher finds out why a pert co-worker — it’s Kim Cattrall — has been nicknamed Lassie.

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In “Porky’s,” drooling voyeurism was played for laughs.Credit20th Century Fox, via Photofest

By 1982, if you were a teen male, your fantasies no longer had to live under a mattress. In a movie theater, you were free, say, to do some vicarious peering into the girls’ shower after gym. The drooling voyeurism, the casual racism, the aggressive anti-Semitism, the backhanded homophobia: None of it is quite the reason to bring “Porky’s” up now.

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The reason to bring up “Porky’s” now is the laughter — the uproarious laughter. Last week, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was asked what she most remembered about the night she says Brett M. Kavanaugh drunkenly assaulted her, she offered, with some quavering, that it was the laughter between Mr. Kavanaugh and his friend. She told the Senate Judiciary Committee: “indelible in the hippocampus” — Dr. Blasey’s a professor of psychology — “is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”

Judge Kavanaugh, who denies Dr. Blasey’s accusation, mentioned “Animal House” in his opening statement. But my mind suddenly found itself on a journey back to “Porky’s.” Laughter accompanies most of the movie’s pranks, many of which are at the girls’ expense. For a comedy, that tends to be lousy filmmaking. It means the movie is hoping its laughter is contagious. The boys laugh at one another and, later, at Porky himself. But women tend to be the object of the most uproarious laughing, especially the Germanic battle-ax gym coach, Ms. Balbricker, who, in the movie’s meanest scene, asks the principal to open an investigation into a shower room peephole. She’s sure she can ID the penis she caught poking through the wall.

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A reference to “Animal House,” from 1978, figured into Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s opening statement during a hearing for his Supreme Court nomination.CreditUniversal, via Photofest

And as she calmly tries to make her case for a police lineup, her fellow gym teachers — men — are cracking up. One slides, in hysterics, onto the floor and out of view, taking a desk phone with him. At some point, the principal loses it, too, and Balbricker, who’s played by Nancy Parsons, storms out in defeat. Even though a penile police lineup probably is unfeasible, there’s also a sex crisis going on at this school, and none of the other faculty members seem to acknowledge the gravity of that. That’s supposed to be funny. And it kind of is. The actors in this scene really do appear to be coming apart in a way that seems both actorly and more real than acting. It goes on just long enough to achieve actual comedy. You give in. But there’s a moral disjunction. I was laughing at them. But they’re laughing at her.

LAUGHTER WAS SALIENT in the account of Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate of Judge Kavanaugh, who said she remembers, during a group drinking session, the judge’s being egged on to put his penis near her face. (He denies that he did it.) This would have taken place in the 1983-84 school year, during a stretch when the movies’ fixation on sex made plenty of room for teenage boys.

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In stories envisioned by grown men, boys in movies — smartass, horny, fun-loving white boys — had it made. They ran brothels (“Risky Business”); punked the principal (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”); battled the school psycho (“Three O’Clock High”); committed all kinds of battery (“Revenge of the Nerds”); excelled, albeit brutally, at juvenile detention (“Bad Boys”); combed the Caribbean for a family vacation (“Hot Pursuit”); invented women to boost their popularity (“Weird Science”); turned into werewolf jocks (“Teen Wolf”); and lied about passing their driving test (“License to Drive”), being a finance executive (“The Secret of My Success”), being cool (“Can’t Buy Me Love”) and being black (“Soul Man”).

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Scott Baio, Willie Aames and Heather Thomas in “Zapped!” (1982). All it took was a little telekinesis to pop open a cardigan.CreditEmbassy Pictures

Deflowering odysseys stretched from Florida (“Porky’s”) to Tijuana (“Losin’ It”), and somebody even made a movie called “The Last American Virgin.” There was usually a system for spying on women and girls, although, to be fair, lots of men did that in the 1980s, in “Stripes” and “Sharky’s Machine” and “Stakeout” and every other rock video on MTV. It all lasted from about 1981 to near the end of the decade, when, in “Like Father, Like Son” and “Big,” magic started turning boys into men. The terrain was divided among nerds, sensitive weirdos and jocks like Josh Brolin in “Goonies,” and the pools seemed full of beer.

From the sounds of what Judge Kavanaugh has disclosed about his high school and college self, he seemed part of that landscape. Though, movie-wise, he also appeared to be into the harder stuff, too. His opening statement last week described his class’s ambitions for the 1983 yearbook as being “some combination of ‘Animal House,’ ‘Caddyshack’ and ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High,’ which were all recent movies at that time.” He was trying to explain and apologize for the book’s general crassness and its perceived cruelty toward one girl in particular, who had to wait 35 years to learn that he and his buddies had formed a club in her name — a teen movie in reverse.

The DNA of all three films — “Animal House” opened in 1978, and “Caddyshack” came two years later — lurks in a lot of the teen-boy films: the four-alarm lunacy, casual obnoxiousness and glorified impunity, but little of the tenderness and drollery. And even though Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy were stars — interesting stars — in John Hughes’s suburbia, Amy Heckerling’s “Fast Times” is the rare entry from that period that could be construed as feminist.

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In “Risky Business” (1983), a young Tom Cruise, center, favored very adult pursuits.CreditWarner Bros., via Photofest

The movies were more vividly granular, stranger, less prom-y than the generation of teen movies that came later. It’s that granularity that probably makes them so hard to dislodge and keeps them stimulating, like the way that Kelly LeBrock — the popularity booster in “Weird Science” — struts very noticed through a shopping mall and turns the head of a punk chick who flicks her cigarette in apparent approval. During this era, there are scores of moments like that, a brew of the exhilarating and unsavory. Indelible in the hippocampus.

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They resurface at a moment like this, when, say, the president is telling the press that the Kavanaugh accusations have him worried about young men. They resurface involuntarily, sand you’re still finding in shoes and pockets, sand like “Zapped!,” something perversely dumb from the summer of 1982, in which Scott Baio uses telekinesis to a pop open a girl’s cardigan, then seduce her. He’s not the real creep though. That would be his buddy Peyton (Willie Aames); he does the sexual harassment and surreptitious snapshotting. They drink themselves silly, have sex with remorseful girls, grow pot, outsmart the principal and go unpunished. Tagline for the poster, which has Mr. Baio and Mr. Aames fixated on a girl’s levitating skirt: “They’re getting a little behind in their classwork.”

There are no long scenes of uproarious laughter in “Zapped!” One girl loses her entire outfit toward the end, in a mass stripping, and the laughter is supposed to come from us. The movie wanted to spoof the telekinesis in “Carrie,” which was a hit in 1976. Laughter, of course, was the trigger point for Carrie — kaleidoscopically uproarious laughter that sends her into an infernal rage that only she survives. The aberration of that kind of comeuppance should tell you where the movies’ priorities had shifted by the early 1980s: from the rumbling psyches of girls to the sexual amusement of their tormentors. At a rally the other day in Mississippi, the president lampooned Dr. Blasey to big cheers. Even now, men are laughing at her.

WHAT ENDED THE ’80s teen-boy movie wasn’t revolution so much as graduation. A lot of these kids became men in adult movies; they became superheroes. And eventually the sexual awakening and inner life of girls — white girls — made it to movies, in “Dirty Dancing,” “Adventures in Babysitting,” “Mystic Pizza” and “Shag,” in the miraculous early career of Winona Ryder. Horror movies made warriors of a few of them. But for most of the 1980s, girls got drunk, spied on, stuffed in car trunks and shopping carts, and laughed at. What they never sufficiently got, besides concurrent movies of their own, was revenge or even justice.

Well, Ms. Balbricker — she tries. “Porky’s” ends with her charging from the bushes and tackling Tommy, demented yet determined to expose him as the owner of that peephole penis. Presumably, she hasn’t forgotten the failure of the men who laughed uproariously rather than catch the culprit. But her attack doesn’t feel anything like justice. It’s like something from a horror comedy instead. The boys have just gleefully demolished Porky’s business, yet it’s Ms. Balbricker whom the cops haul off. Tommy turns to the camera and says, “Jeez.” But the boys don’t admit anything. They just laugh.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4097618&forum_id=2#36958692)

Perhaps there is some explanation in the fact that ''Porky's,'' smutty as it is, has a good-natured streak. The movie's endless dirty jokes are not really at anyone's expense, and its few elements of nastiness are wildly out of place. The ambience is that of a fraternity hazing in which nobody gets hurt.

''Porky's,'' which opens today at the Manhattan, Orpheum and other theaters, is for and about teen-age boys. Its half-dozen principals drive around in vintage convertibles (the action is set during the Eisenhower years), play pranks on one another and joke about the one thing on all of their minds. Their high school classmates are all comparably well-heeled and nice looking, and the girls in the class share the boys' sense of humor. The running gags about one boy's sexual inadequacy are just as likely to be delivered by a girl he has had no luck with as by one of his libidinous buddies.

The movie takes its title from a Florida bordello that, the production notes say, was legendary during Mr. Clark's own Florida adolescence. As recreated for the movie, it features a large neon picture of Porky Pig doing something rude to Petunia. The boys from Angel Beach High School venture to Porky's one day, only to be humiliated by the mean-tempered proprietor (Chuck Mitchell) and the local sheriff, Porky's brother (Alex Karras).

Throughout the rest of the movie, the boys attempt to get even with Porky, and finally they do. But Porky and his vicious henchmen do not get even, though in any other movie these kids would wind up dead as doornails for their mischief. In Mr. Clark's sunny view of things, the boys' attack on Porky merely leads to a scene in which Porky is outsmarted by the entire Angel Beach High School Marching Band.

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Mr. Clark's aim seems to have been to pack every adolescent sex gag he has ever heard into a single movie, and also to include some other random memories of his teen-age years. This produces a cheerfully lewd strain of humor. But it also leads to a certain degree of confusion, because this is a movie in which a subplot about anti-Semitism is handled no differently from another subplot about a peephole in the girls' shower room.

In addition to loading the soundtrack with the songs of Hank Williams and Patti Page, Mr. Clark has tried to recapture the era's racial climate, and so he makes the students a well-meaning but mildly bigoted all-white crowd. Slurs about blacks, Cubans and Jews are delivered casually and do not have any repercussions in the story. But they are bound to startle an audience caught up in the movie's otherwise mindless locker-room mood.

The merits of Mr. Clark's jokes are certainly debatable. A portion of the audience will be strongly offended by ''Porky's,'' just as another portion will find it filthy but fun. However, there is no debating the success of Mr. Clark's casting, for he has assembled a cheerful, likable bunch of actors, most of them unknowns. Mr. Karras and Susan Clark, as a tough-talking prostitute, are virtually the only familiar actors, and theirs are small roles.

Kaki Hunter, who stood out in ''Roadie,'' ''Willie and Phil'' and ''Whose Life Is It Anyway?'', is particularly good here. Miss Hunter plays the trampiest girl in Angel Beach, but hers is a very 1980's brand of vulgarity, which is to say that she is good-humored and contentious at times when a 1950's teen-ager might have been more flustered. Kim Cattrall is amusing as a gym coach with a very vocal approach to sex, and with a squad of cheerleaders who are often seen doing oafish calisthenics in the corner of the frame.

The boys tend to represent specific types. There is a rueful, thoughtful one (Mark Herrier), a big, not-too-smart one (Tony Ganios), a sex-starved silly one (Dan Monahan) and a temperamental, tow-headed regular guy (Roger Wilson, in something like the Mark Hamill role). Because Mr. Clark's screenplay tends to be shapeless and rambling, the charm of his cast is all-important, and most of the actors are pleasant enough to carry the slower scenes. They are not called upon to do much more than slap one another on the back, drive convertibles, eat burgers, cackle at one another's witticisms and otherwise enjoy life in a simpler, sillier day.

The Cast

PORKY'S, written and directed by Bob Clark; director of photography, Reginald H. Morris; editor, Stan Cole; music by Carl Zittrer and Paul Zaza; produced by Don Carmody and Mr. Clark; released by 20th Century-Fox. At the National, Broadway and West 44th Street; the Manhattan, 59th Street between Second and Third Avenues, and the Orpheum, 86th Street at Third Avenue. Running time: 99 minutes. This film is rated R.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4097618&forum_id=2#36958699)

Now

But my mind suddenly found itself on a journey back to “Porky’s.” Laughter accompanies most of the movie’s pranks, many of which are at the girls’ expense. For a comedy, that tends to be lousy filmmaking. It means the movie is hoping its laughter is contagious. The boys laugh at one another and, later, at Porky himself. But women tend to be the object of the most uproarious laughing, especially the Germanic battle-ax gym coach, Ms. Balbricker, who, in the movie’s meanest scene, asks the principal to open an investigation into a shower room peephole. She’s sure she can ID the penis she caught poking through the wall.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4097618&forum_id=2#36958750)

fuck libs. FFFFuck women.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4097618&forum_id=2#36958797)