MOVIE REVIEW : SINGLE-MINDED CLICHE RULES IN ‘LOOSE’

You’d like to be able to say that “Loose Screws” (citywide) is the teen-sex comedy to end all teen-sex comedies--mostly because you’d like to see all teen-sex comedies end, as soon as possible.

It’s not that there haven’t been some good movies among the hundred or so examples of the last few years, though the mind blanks out after “Risky Business,” “Heaven Help Us” and “The Sure Thing.” It’s just that the formula itself seems to guarantee an overwhelming majority of bad ones.

“Loose Screws” doesn’t disappoint you. It’s the formula in excelsis. The only real difference is that it’s been pushed further than usual, one of the hallmarks of Roger Corman, whose Concorde Pictures released it (you expect more from Corman). The movie is single-mindedly prurient, and scenarist Michael Cory has come up with the lewdest language this side of Hustler. Almost every line in the movie is either unprintable or a double entendre.

The plot, once again, follows the antics of four wacky, goofy, sex-crazed guys who enter Coxwell Academy and form a pact to fondle and dally with as many of the female students as possible, devising a special point system to chart their progress. Soon the lecherous zanies run afoul of their arch-nemesis, another in the long line of sneering polyester-clad tyrants who apparently have taken over the U.S. educational system.

Naturally, there’s a scene where our four drooling madcaps drill a hole in the girls’ shower room, and a striptease show where they’re spied by the principal, and a scene where one of them is nearly caught in flagrante delicto with the principal’s wife, and another where they window-peep on the French teacher (“Mona Lott”).

Naturally they get expelled, and then devise an awful revenge: exposing all their enemies as sex-crazed hypocrites themselves. By now, teen-sex comedies are becoming as ritualized as Kabuki (one can imagine aficionados muttering, “Did I miss the shower room?” “When do they secretly film the principal with his pants down?”). This one also manages to throw in an aerobics class, a transvestite invasion of the girls’ dorm, a beach party and weenie roast (not quite worthy of Frankie and Annette), and an aphrodisiac gas attack at a school assembly.

Missing from “Loose Screws,” besides humor, is any conception, even an exaggerated one, of what teen-age sexuality was and is actually like. Like 80% of its competitors, “Loose Screws” looks as if it were made by dirty old men, for an audience composed of people who can’t wait to grow up and become dirty old men.

‘LOOSE SCREWS’

A Concorde release. Producer Maurice Smith. Director Rafal Zielinski. Script Michael Cory. With Bryan Genesse, Karen Wood, Alan Deveau, Jason Warren.

Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (those under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult guardian).