Chapter Two
Police Academy 2 and Revenge of the Nerds II
By Brett Ballard-Beach
October 11, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
A trio of (increasingly less relevant) facts to start with:
The five directors of the first six Police Academy films (Hugh Wilson, Jerry Paris, Jim Drake, Alan Myerson, Peter Bonerz) have between them episodes (in many cases multiple) for about 150 different television shows under their respective belts. (I highlight the word different as many of them worked on the same series as creators, writers, directors, or in the case of Paris and Bonerz, as actors. This doesn’t take into account the scores of made-for-television movies the men also directed or the big screen careers several of them also carved out, most notably Wilson, who also helmed The First Wives Club and Blast from the Past, among others.)
Paris, the director of Police Academy 2 and 3, directed all but 17 episodes of Happy Days from 1974-1984, tallying 238 in total (as ascertained by IMDb). He passed away from complications surrounding surgery for brain cancer only one week after Police Academy 3 opened.
Corinne Bohrer, an actress best known in the last decade for playing Veronica Mars’s absentee mother on multiple episodes of the cult CW series, played the love interest in the fourth installment of both the Police Academy and Revenge of the Nerds series, in each one portraying the love object for the most unhinged/spaztastic character (Zed and Booger, respectively.)
I must be upfront and affirm that this week’s column is not an attempt to rescue Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment and Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise from the fogs of time and reclaim one or both as a lost comic masterpiece. Time has not been kind to either, nor to their respective franchise launchers, both of which debuted in 1984 (Although that hasn’t stopped would-be reboots of both in recent years from proceeding. More on that later).
My approach was initially analytical: what does it mean when a successful, R-rated, raunchy comedy spawns an increasingly family-friendly lineage, in both cases winding up on the small screen? For comparison’s sake, imagine if Warner Bros had decided that The Hangover Part II should have been PG-13 because the first one was so successful that they wanted to broaden the fan base. Would audiences have turned out in the numbers they did to make the second one another $200 million plus grosser? My guess is not. And yet, Warner Bros (and 20th Century Fox) did precisely that, to increasingly declining returns, as will be noted.
I was under the mistaken assumption that this had happened numerous times in the ‘80s, at least as far as T & A comedies were concerned. And yet, when all was said and done, I found only four instances: the two covered in this week’s column and two discussed about two years ago in my Chapter Two on Chevy Chase (Caddyshack begat Caddyshack II which was PG, and National Lampoon’s Vacation led to two PG-13 installments, a PG trip and several made for television movies). There is an interesting side note about a series doing the reverse: Meatballs and Meatballs Part II were PG whereas numbers three and four were hard Rs.
I do note the timing of the advent of the PG-13 rating in late 1984, which could have made a difference regarding the R rating. Revenge of the Nerds would have remained an R regardless. Police Academy? It was certainly more sitcom-like and cartoonish than Revenge of the Nerds and its path towards PG-level shenanigans can already be glimpsed, in-between the blowjobs and boobies. With only a few trims, it would easily be PG-13 today.
I watched Police Academy and Revenge of the Nerds more than any nine-year-old should have (although perhaps not as much as others did) on home video, but even I was skeptical of - and ultimately underwhelmed with - the first sequels. I saw Police Academy 2 on video shortly after its release, on the same night as the first film, and I recall falling asleep, the antithesis if there ever was one of all the sequels I grew up loving more than the originals, or viewing before the originals. I did not see any of them in the theaters and though I have some slight affection for the third one, watching the fourth one for the first time last week convinced me once and for all not to pursue parts five, six, or seven.
I was excited for Revenge of the Nerds II and did see it opening weekend but had not felt compelled to see it again before watching it for this column. When all was said and done, I ended up more disappointed in Revenge of the Nerds II this time around (which isn’t to say I enjoyed Police Academy 2 that much more) precisely because I found Revenge of the Nerds more compelling on every level, even outside of my pre-adolescent drive for the naked female form on celluloid. The sequel pisses away all the goodwill from the first one. Conversely, Police Academy is lackluster in most elements, but particularly in the area where I had expected it would remain strongest: its ensemble. Instead, everyone is pretty much a one-joke pony (if that). Most shockingly, Mahoney,(the character that launched Steve Guttenberg to some kind of stardom a quarter of a century ago) and who to a not quite10-year-old seemed like the swinging ladies’ man incarnate is revealed to be nearly as asexual as Jughead from the Archie comics. It may be strongly implied that he is the beau of the boudoir, but on the basis of the evidence in the films, Tackleberry gets laid more than Mahoney does (and the love scene between David Graf and Colleen Camp is one of the two funny scenes in Police Academy 2).
Like the first film, Police Academy 2 functions more as a series of skits tenuously holding a plot together than as a story (or jokes) with payoffs. This comes partly from the decision to hold the sequel and the ones that followed to under 90 minutes (saving a plethora of deleted footage for the television premieres), and partly because the cast is so huge, there is no way to keep them altogether. On top of that, at least half a dozen major new characters are added - some who will pop up in later installments, some not - such that it becomes akin to sitting through a run of bad sketches on Saturday Night Live, hopeful that the next one will be good, or at least short and painless.
What Police Academy 2 does have in its favor is Bobcat Goldthwait, in his feature-length big-screen debut, as Zed, the gang leader of a pack of miscreants who terrorize the series’ nameless town after apparently having been nixed as extras from Repo Man. With a physical presence suggestive of a Tex Avery character hopped up (er, down?) on an amphetamine-Quaalude cocktail, Goldthwait growl-slurs his lines with a loud soft loud cadence presaging some early ‘90s alternative rock bands, piecing together sentences such that one would be hard-pressed to predict their end from their beginning.
Zed/Goldthwait is so completely out of tune with the rest of the movie that he becomes watchable first by default, then to see precisely when and where next he will hijack the movie. The sequence where the gang “terrorizes” a supermarket is the only sustained bit of lunacy in Police Academy 2. It carries on for at least a couple of minutes, far longer than it needs to, but remains watchable precisely because of its off-kilter vibe. I don’t know why Zed didn’t appeal to me when I was a child - I specifically recall finding the scenes with him the least interesting - and what is to “blame” for the change of heart. Do I have the maturity now to appreciate anarchic juvenilia? Have the spans of time ravaged my critical taste buds? Regardless, Zed works best in small doses. I shudder to imagine an entire movie pitched at that tone and volume.
From a box office standpoint, the Police Academy series shows how a once (marginally) funny idea can be (significantly) ground into the dirt, financially speaking. Before Saw came along with seven consecutive yearly installments in the same month, the Police Academy franchise held the record with six films released between early March and early April, 1984-1989. The first three entries in the series grossed $81 million, $55 million, and $43 million, respectively, and spent a combined 12 weeks at #1.
From there the grosses slipped to $28 million, $19 million, $11 million, and for the barely released Mission to Moscow in 1994, only $125,000. After Their First Assignment, all the other installments were PG. The franchise was also spun off - twice to date - for syndicated television. It appeared first in the late ‘80s as an animated sitcom (which ran on weekdays for one year and tallied 65 episodes) and then as an hour-long comedy in the late ‘90s (which lasted for 8 months and 26 episodes).
A long discussed reboot that has been kicking around since last decade appears to be coming together for a 2013 release and based on the screenwriters and directors currently lined up, seems to be aiming for the raunchiness of the first film and then some. If nothing else, I am sure they will find a way to incorporate Robert Folk’s anthemic opening and closing credits score, with its patriotic brass and good-vibe bounce. If nothing else, watching the first Police Academy films has drilled that tune back into my head (though whether it truly left is debatable).
Revenge of the Nerds was also a hit relative to budget (grossing $40 million against sub-$2 million), but never played as wide as Police Academy, opening in only a few hundred theaters in July of 1984 before nearly tripling its screen count, by summer’s end, and spending several months in the top 10. While Nerds is unabashedly raunchier than Police Academy - mostly stemming from a sequence where hidden cameras are installed in a sorority, leading to what was either my first or second glimpse of full frontal female nudity, the other courtesy of Kelly LeBrock in the PG-13 The Woman in Red - it is also genuinely sweeter, has the better ensemble, and doesn’t seem to get off on humiliating its protagonists when setting the stage for the audience to fully enjoy the jock fraternity getting its comeuppance.
Robert Carradine and Anthony Edwards have great chemistry themselves as best friends Lewis and Gilbert, who form a fraternity for the put-upon outcasts at Adams College. John Goodman as the football coach and James Cromwell as Lewis’ dad offer solid support with little screen time and the soundtrack slams with songs ranging from early ‘80s mainstream pop hits (“Thriller” and “Burning Down the House”) to a lost New Wave gem (Gleaming Spires’ “Are You Ready for the Sex Girls?”). Director Jeff Kanew, working from a script/story with contributions by two different writing teams, crafted an exploitation film that rose above its level, finding a balance between gratuitous nudity, gross-out, and heart that Peter and Bobby Farrelly would get rich off of a decade later. There is also the interesting subtext that the film more or less follows the arc of a slasher movie, but replaces the violence and deaths with panty raids and getting laid, and a little bit of speechifying.
Three years passed (an eon as far as franchises go) before Nerds in Paradise was released in the summer of ’87. It opened wide from the get-go, debuted at #1 and grossed three-quarters of what the original did. From that standpoint, it was a success. But as a film, it is as devoid of laughs and charm as the first one was bountiful. The film strives to find a balance between repeating all of the first feature’s memorable sequences (there is another ad hoc musical performance by the nerds) and taglines (Booger’s “We’ve got bush” is egregiously shoehorned in) and coming up with a new plot.
The Lambda Lambda Lambda crew attends a national fraternity conference where they are once again picked on by a prick-ish douchebag (a young Bradley Whitford replacing the original’s Ted McGinley) and must rise up against their oppressors. If the film was funnier, the lack of raunchy laughs might not be as noticeable, but a tamed down Booger just isn’t as funny. Not helping matters - despite the return of all the key players, Edwards mostly sits this one out (Gilbert stays at home with a broken leg) leaving a big vacant hole at the film’s emotional center.
This is one of only six features directed by producer/former studio head Joe Roth (others include America’s Sweethearts and Christmas with the Kranks) and whatever his successes in those positions, he has no sense of comic rhythm, how to punch up a scene, or pull memorable performances from his cast. Far from a fiasco, it’s simply a rote illustration of the belief that assembling a lot of the same elements for a sequel is the key to success. If there is no understanding of how those elements interacted to create something memorable, the endeavor is primed for failure.
In the early 1990s, third and fourth installments of the franchise (The Next Generation and Nerds in Love) with most of the original cast members aired as made-for-television movies on the still young Fox Network. I have seen neither of these movies but from their descriptions, and even allowing for less raunch than Nerds in Paradise, I take it as an act of faith that they are more tolerable than the failed pilot for the 1991 sitcom version of Revenge of the Nerds (it airs as an extra on the first movie’s “Panty Raid Special Edition”).
I am still dumbfounded that it actually aired. Featuring actors I don’t recall stumbling across in the last 20 years doing horrible community theater interpretations of Lewis, Gilbert, and Booger, it boasts a laugh track that evokes cries of desperation and sucks the marrow out of the first film in order to fill 22 laughless minutes. A reboot of Revenge of the Nerds in 2006 by 20th Century Fox production label Fox Atomic fell through after only several weeks of shooting (for being too raunchy?) and has not been revived.
I am not sure if I am in any better position to answer my question - vis a vis neutering raunchy comedies to promote the longevity of the franchise - than I was at the start of this column. Ultimately, it seems like the most cynical of moves (acknowledging that your film was viewed by a lot of underage teens, you make a movie that they can then see, although they probably won’t want to) even if these aren’t franchises whose fates I lose any amount of sleep over at night. I’ll see how I feel if the world is up to Police Academy 6… again… at the end of this decade.