Seniors (1978)

Senior

Cast:

Dennis "Enemy Mine, opponent of the Lizard Lou Gossett Jr." Quaid is Alan
Priscilla "3rd Generation Come and knock on our door... occupant" Barnes is Sylvia
Alan "Fred Flinstone's Voice 'YABBA DABA DOO!!!' " Reed Jr is Professor Heigner
Jeffrey "Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn" Byron is Larry
Gary Imhoff is Ben

What the box says:

Dennis Quiad plays one of four seniors nearing graduation. However, none seem prepared to tackle the responsibilities of the "real world". Now desperate to do something, they decide to open a sex clinic on campus. To their astonishment, the clinic becomes an overnight success, and then the fun begins.

Plot:

We get fake credits that claim that Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, etc are in the movie before the real credits roll featuring an animated college professor.

The guys, Alan, Ben, Steve, Larry, are afraid of graduating and losing their personal nympho who loves to cook and clean. They carry a bed with Sylvia and one of the guys out of the back of the van to where they live. The guys try calling each of their parents to hit them up to let them stay in college for post graduate work.

The uber-nerdy Arnold shows up. He loves Sylvia. Desperation with the ultimate white “FRO is Arnold. He is working for Professor Heigner. The guys realize that the professor is flooded with grants and his only contact with the outside world is Arnold. They plan to have Arnold get the Professor to sign off on a proposal to study the sex lives of college girls.

Later, Arnold goes to Heigner’s lab. The professor is working on creating a super race of mosquitoes to live after the nuclear war destroys humanity. Arnold gets him to sign the letter.

The Creighton foundation debates whether to approve the grant proposal for the college sex study.

Arnold tells the guys that the grant has been approved. They let Arnold go to Sylvia.

The guys go to the bank. Later, they find Arnold is dehydrated. He has to be given various vitamins and minerals and a shot, too.

The guys rent a new house and begin the research idea which is only a way to bone chicks.

Professor Heigner shows Arnold the new breed of mosquito.

College girls read the ad and start showing up for the “research.”

As the guys sort through the girls questionnaires. Arnold has another round with Sylvia and gets another shot, etc…

Heigner’s lab, Miss Creighton asks him about his newest experiment. She thinks it is the sex lives of college girls while he is talking about mosquitoes.

The guys start scheduling the girls for appointments. They have the girls coming and going, figuratively and literally. The girls are paid and leave.

Miss Creighton breaks into Heigner’s lab and reads his notes. Heigner chases her off.

More “experiments with the girls which goes from shower, 70s meditation, and a gorilla suit?

Who knew getting their freak on would involve a gorilla suit?

More girls want to volunteer as the musical montage scene begins.

Arnold is getting feebler and needs to walk using 2 canes.

The guys realize the cost of the experiments will bankrupt their money fairly soon. They decide to charge guys $50 to contribute to the experiment and keep paying the girls $20. They decide to move to another building

Men start reading the ad for business men to participate in the research but are asked to donate $50. The guys start getting the applications from the men. An old school computer data processing ensues. They get the cops to watch out for trouble.

The guys start scheduling the times for the “research.”

Another music montage ensues; a school bus picks up the girls for “research.” The men get their room assignments.

Arnold is on crutches now. Professor Heigner sees how exhausted Arnold is now.

Business seems to be booming at Phantom research.

Later, Miss Creighton scales down the fireplace and examines Heigner’s research notes which sound even kinkier. He chases her away again.

The guys start to realize how much money they are making. The banker realizes the profit and wants to invest in the Phantom Research Corporation with the rest of the council, Police Commissioner, Bishop, and Banker.

A new research center is set up. The Bishop has nuns doing menial work at the research center which involves driving the buses, collecting the money, etc…The bishop consecrates the new building.

Arnold needs a walker to get to Sylvia now. However, he needs a wheelchair to leave.

A pharmaceutical company wants to buy into Phantom research. The guys accept the offer.

Professor Heigner wheels Arnold into the lab and reveals he will name the mosquito after him at the press conference.

Arnold tells the guys about Professor Heigner’s mosquito research. The guys realize everyone will then know he wasn’t involved with Phantom research.

Miss Creighton begs to sample Professor Heigner’s man power. She wants to marry him.

The guys tell the Banker, Bishop, and the Police Commissioner about Phantom research is just a cathouse. None of them seem bothered by that fact. The committee decides that Professor Heigner must be removed to keep Phantom research going. The guys are bothered by this fact and are locked in a room.

Professor Heigner’s lab blows up. Elsewhere, in Las Vegas, Professor Heigner and Miss Creighton are getting married.

The guys are in the back of a police paddy wagon. The council has decided to get rid of them, too. The plan is to drop the paddy wagon in a lake. The police commissioner learns that Heigner wasn’t in the lab. Unaware the crane operator lifts the car with the committee in it. The guys break out of the paddy wagon and see the limo in midair. Pleading rich white guys ensues. The car is dropped into the lake.

Professor Heigner and Miss Creighton are about to let the consummation ensue. She storms out apparently disappointed with his shortcoming.

The guys learn that Heigner is alive and tell him about the lab. The bitter Heigner kept the super mosquito with him and plans to release it for it to take over the world. The room service guy accidentally kills it.

The guys erase the research data. They figure after paying the bills and will wind up with $50,000 apiece. Life has meaning and pseudo-morals ensue. Don’t be greedy, etc…Not even patriotism matters according to these 70s wahoos.

Arnold is remembered with a page memorial in the yearbook. The guys say goodbye to Sylvia.

The guys leave college and decide to man-whore to the Banker’s young wife. Plenty of post grad work here…

What I say:

With Valentine's Day, I thought I should have some sort of romantic movie. Well, this site is one of the last places a chick flick would be. No monster movies come to mind. Then, an idea struck. The 70s with its deranged philosophy could have something especially one of the almost ready to review movies. Thus the Seniors being reviewed this week.

Long before college comedies like Accepted which came out last year or even before PCU in the mid-90s, long before the 80s sex comedy managed to drive the sex college movies into the realms of direct to video shelves, there was the 70s. The swinging 70s babbbbeyyyyyyyyyyyy, yeah....You can cut the funky 70s background music if you like. While movies like the Harrad Experiment tried to drown the audience in pseudo-hippyness and lame drama, most of the sex college movies of the 70s were comedies especially the drive-in fare that revelled in their raunchiness. Now, I'm sure if anyone pays attention to Seniors, I'm sure that people would ask well there's no college. OK, the movie completely ignores the college aspect, how 4 guys can basically run a house of ill-repute while not attending any classes and graduate sounds like they were attending a degree mill school at the very beginning.

The swinging 70s with most of its drive-in fare are too tame to fall into the sexsploitation movies of Jess Franco, etc..Seniors is one of the numerous drive-in movies with all the patent pending insane moral that is to justify everything in the end. For a movie that seems to offer quite a few morals at the end, the entire idea of pimping women isn't mentioned. Well, "being greedy" and "being patriotic" are bad according to this movie...That must be some of those old-fashioned ideas that should be abandoned because of the advanced society norms because of close to free love in the 70s. Though, these guys are only a hop and skip away from being those greedy evil yuppies of the 1980s. Normally, implying that being in college is almost a license to kill or for complete insane ideas that are so far from logic Evel Knievel couldn't jump it with a jet-powered motorcycle even if portrayed by George Hamiliton in the Evel Knievel in the made for TV biography.

Actually another movie that just sort of popped in my head which came out a few years later that was sort of similar Night Shift with Henry "Fonz" Winkler and Michael "I'm Batman!!" Keaton as 2 love brokers operating out of the morgue on the graveyard shift...The gr-gr-gr-gr-gr-gr-graveyard shift...Sorry, when I hear the phrase "graveyard shift" I have to try to sing the end credit song to Stephen King's the Graveyard Shift. Well, Dr. Detroit also popped up during my rambling of finishing this review, too.

Normally, I try to avoid mentioning other movies that the director did on general principle. However, a certain few directors must be acknowledged or else, Rodney Amateau directed Seniors and quite a few episodes of various TV shows like the Dukes of Hazzard and its epic spinoff, Enos. Those shows aren't good enough for me to ramble on about director credits. One movie justifies my rambling. A movie that a true child of the 80s has to remember because it has been etched with a rusty nail that would probably cause tetanus in their minds: Garbage Pail Kids the Movie.

Arnold could only be more white and nerdy had he guest appeared in Weird Al's video like Donny Osmond...Arnold had the giant white-guy fro from the 70s that would embarrasss Horshack from Welcome Back Kotter. He is just around because what is funnier than nerdy-hornballs. Nerdy-hornballs with giant white 70s Fros. The only thing possibly funnier is the cussing little old lady who kicks someone in the nads. Pretty much Arnold was just the running gag about how Sylvia was bonking the years off his life.

For the most part, I didn't really even try to tell the main characters apart. Why bother? Granted, I recognized when Dennis Quaid popped up. All these guys had practically the same personality from the beginning to the end of the movie. None of them changed in any fashion. I can't think of any other movie that has quite a group of completely interchangeable characters for leads. Well, excluding some of the disposable horror movies of the past few years.

The realm of science demands that movie scientists must have completely useless projects. What world needs a genetically engineered super-enhanced mosquito? I'm sure it being released after the nuclear war is some sort of lame Cold War joke. Well, the 80s had all the post apocalyptic movies after the big nuke wiped the Earth clean.

Seniors had the frumpy woman who is at heart needing a little somethin' somethin' or in the vernacular of the Scorpions needs to "be rocked like a hurricane..." More than the the typical frumpy chick from these movies just needs to take off her glasses and let down her hair, and the newest sex kitten is reporting for duty.

Well, before the days of chestical augmentation, that gave us such celebrities as Tara Reid who has one side a bit more obviously deformed than the other. It is almost impossible to believe there is a movie that doesn't feature any silicon or saline enhanced chesticals. Instead of the vapidly blonde Playmates of thedirect to video movies of the late 90s, Seniors has a more realistic group of women. See what a Playboy Playmate of the 70s like uber-fine Claudia Jennings looked like compared to the heaving silicon super-enhanced bazoongas of today...Well, that and the body styles have changed to the point of the methed-bulimic waifs of today, too.

Imagine an alternate reality where, people can get away with anything if they have the proper excuse. Scientific research. All the women are just rarin' to go as soon as they can contribute to sex research and get paid for it. The men are even more willing and able to even contribute money to scientific research that lets them get a little somethin' somethin'. I'm sure that the Seniors coming out in the 1970s had something to do with being able to exploit the 60s free love.

Imagine a movie that has the characters not learning anything. In the end, the protagonists haven't done killed any monster or stopped any terrorists. You could have scraped the gunk out of bathroom tiles and gotten as much out if you had watched the Seniors. I am getting more disgusted with the 70s philosophy in it. This isn't a boring movie like Massacre. Letting chesticals distract the audience from a lack of story can only work for so long. What am I saying? Must be getting sick. If you put any thought into this movie, subtract a Ninja from the rating. Otherwise, almost shocking to find a movie that definitely isn't PG-13 even if it was from a decade that didn't have that rating.

Quotable Dialogue
"He likes me cause I remind him of an insect."
"Waiting to satisfy your carnal lust."
"It's King Kong! He's going to make love to me!!"
"I like him. He's not one of those long haired freaks."
"Fear and insecurity, hit 'em where they live."
Morals of the Story
Scientists love watching insects go at it...
Mosquitoes love lubrication.
Girls have fantasies about guys wearing gorilla suits...
Fire extinguishers can be used for crowd control.
Having nuns collect your pimp money is classy.