MOVIE REVIEW : ‘College’ Offers Laughs to a Degree

This week’s celebrated fine film openings include both “Road House,” with the direction credited to one Rowdy Herrington, and now “How I Got Into College” (citywide), directed by a Mr. Savage Steve Holland. It’s an especially good weekend at the nation’s movie houses for either auteurs or professional wrestlers.

Holland, of “One Crazy Summer” and “Better Off Dead” wacked-out teen-pic notoriety, isn’t exactly known for a light satirical touch. And he was hurriedly brought onto the “College” set after the previous director was fired, purportedly because she was trying to add some small measure of sophistication to what was being positioned by the studio as a sub-low-brow slapstick comedy. None of these omens augur well for a good picture.

“College” isn’t a good picture by a long stretch, but it’s not half as noxious as the personnel changes, the long shelf time and (especially) the commercials would promise. Holland’s touch is not as heavy-handed as you might expect; he lets the good, the bad and the ugly gags in Terrel Seltzer’s uneven but intermittently amusing script all zip by breezily enough, and doesn’t let his zaniness completely eclipse sensitivity to character.

Buying the movie involves buying the idea that waiting to hear back from colleges is a major life trauma on the order of marriage, childbirth or the onset of male pattern baldness. (The kids here keep phoning home for mail updates, screaming at their parents: “Is the envelope fat or not?”) This limits the target audience pretty much to high school juniors and seniors, who may get a kick out of Holland’s overdramatization of the admissions process with occasional horror-movie music and deep-focus photography parodies.

The post-SAT-anxiety set, wearied by the “Porky’s” legacy, may manage to find a little consolation in a plot centered around the desperate campaign of one senior (Corey Parker) to be admitted to an exclusive institution of higher education--even if his quest does have more to do with catching up with the girl of his dreams (Lara Flynn Boyle, who looks a cross between Elizabeth McGovern and Brooke Shields, as the prom queen with a heart of gold) than the pursuit of truth. In this genre, you take what nobility you can get.

As it now stands, “How I Got Into College” (MPAA-rated PG-13 for two cuss words) isn’t exactly Ivy League material, but bored-of-education high schoolers playing hooky during the teachers’ strike could find far less motivational matinees to attend.