Homework begins the only way it could, with perpetually horny teen/aspiring rock star Tommy (Michael Morgan) shirking math problems to dream about an adult magazine photoshoot while some sort of New York Dolls pastiche plays in the background before the whole affair ends on a ridiculous freeze frame.
After being a creeper and spying on the girl’s locker room, and ogling the new French teacher the school shrink confirms Tommy is horny… well, now it’s official…
Anyway, before long Tommy begins recruiting his friends into filling slots on his Jukebox Hero dreams, but they have business of their own to contend with; for example his gal pal Sheila would rather pursue her pro swimmer aspirations, and his best friend Ralph (Lanny Horn) is preoccupied with that aforementioned teacher… although his pals Mix (Mark Brown) and Cookie (Renee Harris) are into it hardcore, even if Cookie’s strict father (Bill Knight) isn’t.
To be fair, they have a hell of a draw in the form of Lisa (Shell Kepler) who plays bass while riding a skateboard… though she’s in danger of being poached… or sexually assaulted… or both by the inexplicably named Reddog (Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time‘s Wings Hauser).
Meanwhile Shelia’s British mother Diane (Dynasty‘s Joan Collins… though perhaps for this crowd 1977’s Empire of the Ants would be more appropriate) has a few freeze frames of her own, dreaming about her happy horny days in the 1950’s, accompanied by ludicrous faux-Doo Wop music.
Will Tommy (and in a different way his band) make it, or will he be a virgin/rock n’ roll casualty forever?
Does anyone think the above sounds a bit disjointed? Well, that’s because it totally is!
The barely there plot exists only to whisk us from one fantasy set-piece to another with frequent stops to non-sequiturs, sex scenes, and humor that would never fly today (which just adds to the surreal vibe this flick unintentionally gives off)… and the obviously inserted sequences featuring body doubles are a real scream (especially in Collins’ case).
It all shouldn’t work, but it does, in a fever-dream sort of manner… to often ham-fisted, cheesy fried cinematic gold effect as we follow our large cast from one outrageous thing to another before we get to the draw dropping culmination of the Third Act that was so obviously an after thought that it becomes a near Dadaist statement awash in the aforementioned very obvious body doubles, editing that appears to have been done by tossing the film in the air and having at it with scissors, and a case of movie poster catfishing that was as expected as it was shameless.
And owing to the fact that the film was actually shot in the ’70s everything seems anachronistically askew for a film released in ’82, which just makes it weirder, dig? That isn’t helped by the film’s somewhat nihilistic but hopeful (two things that always go together) conclusion…
Extras to accompany the feature are slim and include an interview with this film’s producer Max Rosenberg, a legend in genre film creation, a promotional image gallery, and the films trailer (along with a handful of other Unearthed Films trailers).
A product of it’s time (even though it was technically ahead of the curve in many ways as far as ’80s sex comedy tropes are concerned given it’s production date), Homework is a heady and horny experience that is as absurd as it is totally entertaining, and I hope Unearthed brings us more of this kind of fantastic nonsense soon!
