‘HARDBODIES 2’ GOES SOFT IN THE HEAD

In “Hardbodies 2” (citywide) we’re reintroduced to our old friends: the daffy, goofy sex-crazed movie guys. This time, they’re surfers.

Or are they? The first “Hardbodies” was based on an article in Penthouse. But here the screenwriters seem to have read Pirandello, or watched “8 1/2”--or maybe talked to someone who has. “Hardbodies 2” is a movie within a movie: The heroes are two zany surfers who have been cast as zany surfers in a movie about madcap lechery on the beaches of Greece.

So we have two sets of daffy, sex-crazed guys--both played by the same actors and both behaving as lewdly and stupidly as possible. And we have a lecherous cost-conscious producer, his frustrated wife, an arty female director, her dippy assistant, a swishy art director, a gorgeous co-star, a jealous girlfriend, and a bunch of crazy Greeks who speak in pidgin English (which is then subtitled).

Despite all this, the distinction between real life and illusion is hard to grasp. Both the movie within and the movie without look pretty much the same: silly, inept, badly shot and atrociously acted by people who mug and flail wildly at the camera. And reality and illusion sire similar jokes: We see the actors throw food at each other, chortle, and eat off each other’s foreheads. (This is the movie.) Or we see them make love in airplane toilets, and accidentally flush their clothes away. (This is real life.) Which is which? Is life a bad movie? Or have bad movies become a way of life?

We’ll never know. Or care. “Hardbodies 2” often seems to have been made by people who’d rather be off surfing themselves. So why complain if they’ve produced a stupefying, unfunny, driveling botch? At least they’ve fulfilled their obligations--which seems to have stipulated the baring of as many bosoms (three dozen or so) as indecency allows. And at least one actress, Brenda Bakke, looks great and has a reasonable grasp on her nitwitted part. Why be negative? There have been worse movies than this one--though it’s hard to recall them.