''When it comes down to making out...put on side 1 of Led Zeppelin IV.'' —Fast Times at Ridgemont High
In addition to Pee Wee, Meat, and the rest of the Porky's gang at Angel Beach High, that magical year brought us Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Last American Virgin, and Zapped! — summoning up as varied a collection of adolescent neuroses as you're likely ever to encounter. If Porky's had the advantage of being first out of the gate, Fast Times quickly established itself as the classiest of the breed — it was the Citizen Kane of teen sex comedies — thanks to Sean Penn's dazed-and-confused star turn as Jeff Spicoli (''Aloha, Mr. Hand!''), the easy-on-the-eyes Cates, and Brian Backer's lovable loser Mark ''Rat'' Ratner, who nurses a puppy-dog crush on Jennifer Jason Leigh's Stacy with all the wounded sincerity of the last mutt left at the pound.
What all of these movies have in common — other than their leering fascination with naked women, of course�is that they show just how confusing and excruciatingly painful it is to be a teenager. That's a message you're not likely to find anywhere in Girls Gone Wild: Mardi Gras. In Fast Times, Rat loses Stacy to an older, smoother stereo salesman and then, as the decisive knife in the back, to his best friend, Damone (Robert Romanus). In The Last American Virgin, Gary (Lawrence Monoson) also yearns for a good girl (Diane Franklin) who gets used by his skeevy best friend (Steve Antin), becomes pregnant, and is forced by his shallow indifference to have an abortion. I don't want to make this movie sound like a depressing Sundance flick, because it's not; there's also a Porky's-esque locker-room peephole scene and the Cars shaking it up on the soundtrack. But it's a hell of a lot deeper than the shallow end of the pool that Pee Wee and the gang were splashing around in.
As for Zapped!, well, how can you argue with the dream team of Scott Baio and Willie Aames? Baio plays a high school science whiz who develops telekinesis after an explosion in the school's chemistry lab. And it's only a matter of time before his horndog buddy (Aames, playing the part as if born to it) convinces him to use his superpowers to make foxy mean girl Heather Thomas' dress fly off at the prom. The movie's like Carrie with a boner. Was there ever any doubt that there'd be a Zapped Again!?
NEXT PAGE: The five golden rules of '80s teen sex comedies
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