McCARTHY MONDAY 

The standout memory I have of this movie (Class, 1983), involves hanging out at my grandmother's house that summer and watching an episode of Siskel & Ebert. (Pretty sure my grandmother was the one watching, I was just sitting with her.) The guys were discussing this new teen movie about a boarding school student who has an affair with an older woman who turns out to be his roommate's mother. They showed a scene from the film wherein the main character and Roommate's Mom are about to start going to town on each other in an elevator. My grandmother harumphed at the depravity occurring on the TV screen and promptly ordered me out of the living room. "You don't need to be watching that kind of trash," she said, giving me a look. I reluctantly got up and shuffled out of there, wondering what the big deal was. I watched way worse stuff at home all the time, since my parents and everyone else in the neighborhood had gotten cable a few years prior. Along with getting to see all the sex and violence we could handle on HBO (we were mainly interested in stuff like Friday the 13th and "naughty" teen sex comedies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High), there was a steady supply of porn magazines--some of the more explicit rags, like High Society and Oui--hidden out in the woods that bordered my friend Caroline's house, the same woods that on the other side happened to border the playground behind John Strange Elementary, my school. In hindsight, I really want to believe that the culprit was some horny kid who was forced to stash his stroke books where his parents wouldn't find them, i.e. the wooded lot off of North Ewing Street....because the idea of some pedo-vert strategically placing hardcore porn rags in and around the woods behind an elementary school is too disturbing to contemplate. Also, that probably should've been two paragraphs. My apologies. 

I eventually did see Class a year or two later when it was in heavy rotation on HBO, and it turned out that my grandmother--a very wise woman, by the way--was 100% correct. I didn't need to be watching that kind of trash, but not because of the (lame) sex scenes and the (mostly lame) teenage boy hijinks. It's because Class, well....it kinda sucks.  

The movie takes place at an all-boys boarding school outside Chicago. The bros on the dorm engage in your typical raunchy teen movie antics; pulling endless pranks on one another, smoking copious amounts of weed, and trying to get off with the girls at the neighboring all-female prep school. Sensitive guy Jonathan (Andrew McCarthy), journeys to Chicago on the advice of his roommate Skip, hoping to lose his virginity to some worldly big-city gal. Jonathan meets Ellen (Jacqueline Bissett), an older woman who picks him up at a bar. Suddenly the movie shifts gears and morphs into a tender-yet-inappropriate romance that comes to a screeching halt when Ellen discovers that Jonathan is only seventeen (not a grad student as he'd led her to believe) and she wisely "nopes" it out of there. Jonathan is depressed for a while, and then, after the inevitable "Hey I'd love to spend the holidays with your family, Skip. It's a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. HOLYSHITIVEBEENFUCKINGMYROOMMATESMOMALLALONG." If that weren't enough, it soon becomes clear that Ellen is battling a raging alcohol addiction that disgusts her husband, Skip's father (played by Cliff Robertson). And boom! Now we got a tense family drama. 

Jonathan and Ellen rekindle their relationship after the boys return to school following Christmas break. Skip eventually tracks Jonathan to a local motel, finds him in bed with Mom, and goes predictably apeshit. Back at school, Dad arrives to inform Skip that Ellen has voluntarily checked herself into a psych hospital (offscreen)--and, with that--she handily disappears from the movie and is seen nevermore. Tensions between Jonathan and Skip boil over, culminating in a vaguely homoerotic wrestling match in the woods. The boys end up back at the dorm, covered in leaves and mud, all pissed off and exhausted. Skip makes a wisecrack. Jonathan turns to him. They both start laughing, and....freeze frame! The End. I guess the message is, "bros before hos," even when the ho is yo mama.

Well, like I said, Class is a bad movie. And not the fun kind of bad--it's the not-good kind of bad, with all those weird tonal shifts and Rob Lowe trying too hard to be the manic, funny guy. The film also lowkey hates women; the female characters are either snotty, shallow bitches (the girls from the neighboring prep school), boozy trainwrecks (Ellen), or pointlessly cruel cunts (the lady who tricks Jonathan into marking up his face with a coin).  

One thing the movie has going for it, at least, is an impressive cast. Besides Lowe and McCarthy, Class is teeming with soon-to-be familiar faces in supporting roles. You got John Cusack, Virginia Madsen, Cameron from Ferris, one of the girlfriends from Weird Science, Lolita Davidovich, and a kid who I vaguely remember from some other Reagan-era flick. There may be more, but you'd have to look closely. 

Upside: Andrew McCarthy is frickin' adorable in this.

Verdict: I give it half a Blane. 

Class can probably be found somewhere on streaming, but seriously, why bother?