Screwballs

Normally, I wouldn't give a movie like this a second thought. 14 year old me would've rented this in a heartbeat, but 48 year old me is well and truly past the teen sex comedy genre. But I saw a couple YouTube videos doing retrospectives on movies of the 80's, and they mentioned this as more of a satire of the teen sex comedy genre. There's students named Purity Busch and Melvin Jerkovski and Bootsie Goodhead. That sounded funny. Yeah, it's not that. It's not even close. This thing doesn't have any cleverness or wit. Screwballs banishes wit to a realm of sadness and fear. Screwballs is from that vein of "satire" that thinks doing satire is boiling it down to crude stereotypes and doing them as loudly and as often as possible. See, there's a fat student that's a chronic masturbator, and his last name is Jerkovski. Get it? Purity Busch is the most desired girl in school, and also the only virgin. Purity. Virgin. Get it? The high school is named Taft & Adams. Well, what happens when you initialize that? T&A. DO YOU GET IT? I'll give Screwballs this, it never stops steering into the skid. Porky's has that weird subplot about the Jewish kid and the member of the friend group that hates him for being Jewish, but it turns out he's a dick because his dad is abusive. Or The Last American Virgin suddenly turning into an after-school special about teen pregnancy in the last act. No, Screwballs is nothing but corny and horny. But simply doing the thing other movies do but bigger, louder, and more often isn't satire, it's just reductive and lazy. It's not that Screwballs assumes you want nothing but rock-stupid humor and topless women; it's that Screwballs can't conceive of anything else, and thinks burying you in an avalanche of it will make up for what its missing. There is nothing Screwballs can offer modern audiences, besides a sense of shame.