Director: Bob Clark.
Cast: Don Monahan, Mark Herrier, Kim Cattrall, Wyatt Knight.
Running Time: 98 minutes.
Certificate: 18.
Special Features: Audio commentary with director Bob Clark, Porky’s Through the Peephole featurette, Skin Classic! featurette, Trailers.
First things first, although one of the earliest instances of a teen comedy, up until a few days ago I had never seen PORKYS, meaning that my viewing for the Blu-Ray re-release was through fresh eyes from a member of a different generation. I understand that the film is seen as a pioneer of the teen comedy genre, with PORKYS being the AMERICAN PIE of the time; whilst it may once have been innovative, it personally left me cold.
Call me picky, but I like some plot to my films and PORKY’S is exceptionally anemic in this section. It was just teenage boys being horny jokesters which, whilst amusing to some, just doesn’t stand up against similar films made more recently.
Some films get better with age, this isn’t one of them. For viewers not watching the film with rose-tinted spectacles the film appears incredibly dated. It’s a film made in the eighties, but set in the fifties. It was obviously trying to ‘do a GREASE’, hoping to be a nostalgic throw-back, which at the time I’m sure was a lot of fun. Now though, watching a thirty-odd year old film pretend to be a sixty-odd year old film just results in a rather monotonous, tedious affair. It’s old enough that Sex and the City‘s Samantha, aka Kim Cattrall, is barely a teenager. After viewing her ‘howling’ in PORKY’s it’s clear that she got typecast fairly early in her career.
I understand that the target demographic for the feature is teenage boys, but the female characters are hideously underdeveloped, at least AMERICAN PIE had four relatively strong female characters. PORKY’S has none and is very misogynistic in how they are treated, all them are are boobs on legs.
Not one of the characters is likeable, and the police are represented as nothing more than overgrown children with badges as they become involved in the war between Porky’s nightclub and the teen basketball team.
Smut at its most base level, PORKY’S will bring back youthful memories to the original audience, but may struggle to find a new fan-base in today’s over saturated teen market.
[usr=2] PORKY’S is released on Blu-Ray on 16th June 2014.
