Summer School
Here’s the deal: I am, and always have been, shit terrible at math. I mean…I know my times tables and all of the basic stuff. I’ve been working in the service industry for over 20 years so I can look at a signed credit card receipt and know within seconds whether I got a 20% gratuity or not. Anything more complicated than that just ties my head in knots, man. I had a heroically difficult time getting through my high school’s math program. It took me four years to complete three courses. I spent every grueling minute of math class whining to the teacher about how I would never need to use these complicated formulas in real life. “Not if you want to wait tables until you’re in your mid 40’s instead of pulling down $300k a year working as an engineer you won’t,” he replied. He didn’t actually say this, of course…but he should have! Junior year geometry class was a particularly vibrant stain of shit to which there was no cleansing solution. I bombed hard all year and knew a trip to summer school was inevitable if I wanted to graduate on time. Did I want to go to summer school? Shit no! It was 1995 and I had just gotten my license and a used Saab and a girlfriend and Apollo 13 was in the theaters and Lollapalooza with Hole and Sonic Youth was coming to town! But I figured summer school would be full of fun field trips to local amusement parks and screenings of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The reason I thought this is that I'd seen the 1987 comedy Summer School around 125 times…and that’s what happens in that particular film. I did not find real life summer school to be as such. First—I had to travel to a high school in a neighboring town five days a week, which means I had no buddies to josh around and play hide the hypotenuse with. There was a cute girl who sat next to me named Kir who drove a VW Rabbit and with whom I had the following one conversation with–Me: Hey…uhh..Her: NOPE. Second—the teacher looked and talked exactly like the late actor Lawrence Tierney, in character as Joe Cabot from Reservoir Dogs. He seemed endlessly frustrated that no one understood geometry (IDK maybe because we were all in summer school??) and would get all growly and say shit like “I don’t know who you goddamn kids think you’re messing with” and “you people look like you’d rather be walking around the woods with a bottle of booze!” (Note: at 8 AM?) I rarely did my homework and douched most of the tests but still managed to squeak out with a D minus. I graduated from high school…and college too! I still have no grasp of rudimentary geometry to this day. Mention an isosceles triangle around me and I need to pop 3 Xanax just to calm myself down.
We’re here today to talk about the 1987 Summer School, which was written by the guy who created Full House and directed by man who lived an extraordinarily long time, Carl Reiner. Reiner’s career spanned 3/4 of a century…but in the mid 1980’s he seemed to have been under contract to Paramount to exclusively direct films with the word “summer” in the title. Ok, it’s only two movies…this one and Summer Rental with John Candy…but they came out less than two years apart. Did they just send that mothefucker to the beach and tell him to wait for some scripts to show up?? Maybe Carl Reiner just REALLY liked summer…I don’t know. I know that Roger Ebert gave Summer School a 0.5 star review where he said “.It's a vaporfilm. You see it, you leave the theater, and then it evaporates, leaving just a slight residue, something like a vaguely unpleasant taste in the memory.” I obviously disagree as I’m here writing about it some 35 years later! Anyway, we open at Random Southern California High, where the end of the school year is just minutes away. No one is more excited than Phys Ed teacher Freddie Shoop (NCIS star and edgy John Ritter, Mark Harmon), who’s about to split for Hawaii with his GF as soon as the closing bell rings. Dude’s got his Leis on already and everything. Before school’s out…for…the summer…the school sergeant at arms walks around pink slipping a group of kids who are just now learning that they failed Remedial English and will have to attend summer school. They all seemed shocked…and I’m like…seriously?? I knew I was gonna fail chemistry on the first…fucking…day, y’all. Mole schmole. A cameoing Carl Reiner is supposed to teach summer school, right, but he hits $50k on a scratch ticket and decides to up and quit. For 50 grand!? Seems unwise to me…but again…I’m bad with numbers. This is most unfortunate news to Vice Principal Gill (some actor named Robin Thomas who looks so much like Steve Carrell that I had a hard time believing that it wasn’t Steve Carrell even though I’ve seen this movie 126 times and Steve Carrell was only 25 when it came out and hence younger than most of the actors who play the high school students). Surely there’s protocols in place if they need to replace a summer school teacher, right? In this movie it involves Gill frantically running around the parking lot trying to harangue departing faculty into taking the gig. When everyone and their mother turns Gill down, he zeroes in on Fred Shoop, who tells him, you know, that he’s going to Hawaii….and is a gym teacher. Totally legit excuses. Gill threatens him and tells him that he’ll make sure he doesn’t get tenure If he doesn’t teach summer school. Wait, do PE teachers get tenure?? That sounds iffy to me. Shoop has no choice but to accept. His GF leaves for Hawaii without him.Jerk.
When Shoop arrives for first day of class he runs into Robin (Shelly Long who does a ton of blow Kirstie Alley) and begins sexually harassing the shit out of her. She’s a history teacher and denim skirt enthusiast and somehow Shoop does not know her. Wait, how big is this high school?? He begs her to go out with him but she’s already dating principal Gill because of course he is. Shoop continues on to his classroom, where he finds a motley crew of 80’s movie stereotypes. There’s the nerd (Eakian)…the jock (Kevin)…the pretty blonde (Pam)…the pregnant girl (Rhonda)…the foreign exchange student who doesn’t really need to be there (Anna-Maira)…the male stripper (Larry)…the burnouts (Chainsaw and Dave), and the black girl (Denise), whom they made dumber than everyone else. Like…she’s dyslexic and can’t even drive a car. Yikes, dudes. Yikes. The kids are STOKED when they see Shoop is gonna be their teacher. I don’t know, man—my gym teachers were all huge pricks…but just to me and only because I’m terrible at sports too. What AM I good at?? Writing obviously! Right? RIGHT!?? The students ask Shoop if they can swear in class and he’s like sure so they start screaming “anal abscess!” and “jism head!” I laughed my ass off at this scene…when I was 9. Shoop doesn’t want to teach and the kids don’t want to learn so they spend the next 30 minutes going on field trips all over SoCal: they hit the beach…they ride the coasters at Knotts Berry Farm, they pet animals at an animal petting sanctuary. When Gill gets wind of this he suspends Shoop, who’s like FINALLY! Maybe dude can still make it down to the big island. He realizes his volleyball coaching tenure is on the line, though, so he begs for a second chance. He shows up in a suit and tells the kids that they actually have to start learning stuff. They tell him that they are unable to learn as they are all dumb. Eakian suggests they work out a little quid pro quo: they’ll promise to study If Shoop promises to do one special, highly personal and impractical and possibly illegal favor for each one of them. Since the class has whittled down from about 20 to just the main stereotypes I mentioned previously, Shoop agrees. He’ll have to play lamanze coach to Rhonda and football coach to Kevin. He’ll teach Denise how to drive and host an in class screening of Texas Chainsaw for Chainsaw and Dave. I wonder if they knew in advance that they could use clips from Texas Chainsaw Massacre or if they just wrote a character named Chainsaw and hoped for the best like the dude who wrote Being John Malkovich. Paramount owned Friday the 13th at the time…they could’ve always just named the kid Machete. Machete and Dave? That could’ve worked out. So the deals are in place but Shoop suddenly realizes that he doesn’t know how to teach. He runs across to Robin’s classroom to sexually harass her some more slash beg her to teach him how to, you know, teach. He’s like “I want to INSPIRE the kids…like the guy in Dead Poets Society or the other guy in Stand and Deliver. Robin has no idea what he’s talking about as neither of those films have been released yet.
Shoop hosts a party at his house where the entire class is allowed to consume alcohol. These kids love to get twisted. Chainsaw in particular spends most of the movie drinking hard liquor straight from the bottle. It’s kind of dark! Speaking of dark, Pam corners Shoop in his bedroom and asks him if he ever dated any of his students. “I hear your girlfriend is only 21,” she says. “Well I’m 16!” I turn and vomit into the crack in my sofa. Don’t worry—the actress who plays Pam is 22 so it’s cool…and Shoop isn’t interested anyway. The next 30 or so minutes follow Shoop as he completes the tasks his students blackmailed into doing. He helps Denise pass her driver’s exam and rents a print of Texas Chainsaw to screen in class and whatever and so on. When Chainsaw and Dave are caught drinking at the beach, Shoop tells the police that the booze is his and is immediately cuffed and led to the pokey wearing nothing but nut hugging shorts and roller skates. As if this dude’s summer isn’t sucking hard enough, when he arrives home from prison he finds Pam on his doorstep with all of her earthen possessions. She’s like…I never asked you for a favor like the other kids so I’m just gonna go ahead and move in with you and we’ll be square, K? She moves in and starts playing house and making her famous manicotti for dinner. Robin drops by to say hello and sees what’s going down and is like “can I talk to you outside for a minute, Polanski?” Shoop assures her that there isn’t anything going on beyond innocent blackmail. Robin is like DUDE…you are living with your 16 year old student!!!! Shoop has to go to court to fight his reckless endangerment of a minor charges but the kids show up as character witnesses and he beats the charges. So at least there’s that I guess. Mark Harmon seems only vaguely interested in acting in this movie. I think he won People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive around this time so he probably figured he was set for a good while.
When Shoop tells his crew that they need to buckle down for the big upcoming climactic English test, they refuse to study unless he agrees to more blackmail. What…do they want to watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre TWO now?? With Dennis Hopper? Pass. Shoop tells them to fuck right off and quits. Gill is stoked and hires a buttoned down type but when she shows up for her first day, Chainsaw and Dave have turned the room into a horror movie set with Rick Baker-grade horror makeup. There’s severed heads and detached eyeballs and a disembodied hand that crawls around the room pulling tongues out of mouths. It’s $75k worth of FX…easy! If Chainsaw and Dave are really that talented at horror makeup they should drop out of high school ASAP and go work on Phantasm 2. Fuck an English test, dudes! The new teach quits on the spot and the kids beg Gill to bring back Shoop. Even though Shoop is a criminal, he agrees.
Shoop comes back and there’s a “studying for the big test” montage that sets up the climactic test taking sequence. It’s very hard to squeeze drama out if a bunch of kids just sitting around taking a test…but they try! It ain’t exactly a karate match, amirite? At least they set the scene to a pumped up 80’s jam with lyrics like “we’re doing what can’t be done…” as we watch the kids trying to do what can’t be done. Rhonda goes into labor during the test…so I guess that’s some minor excitement anyway. The class reconvenes at the beach several days later and everyone congratulates Rhonda on the baby. She’s like…thanks. They're all…so where’s the baby…and she’s like..I gave it away…and they’re like….Oh. Long awkward silence. Then Shoop shows up and tells the kids that they didn’t pass their test. Again…dark shit….
Shoop is called before head principal Kelvin, who has been absent for this entire movie, to hear the charges against him. Not gonna lie..it does NOT sound good. Providing alcohol to minors…housing a 16 year old female student…mopery. Gill is positively beaming as the charges are read. He hands Kelvin a sheet of paper and says “just sign here and Shoop’s termination will be complete.” Termination? This motherfucker is looking at 3 to 6 in San Quentin…EASY! But Kelvin is like “not so fast, Michael Scott—there’s some people we need to hear from first!” The office door opens and in walks the entire class along with their parents, most of whom were just meeting for the first time. I’ve said this before but you aren’t supposed to introduce new characters after page 10 of a screenplay and certainly not in the last five minutes of the movie! They hand Shoop the test scores and it turns out that, while not everyone failed, the class cumulative was below failing. Cumulative? Did I say that right. Shoop goes around the room ticking off the scores one by one. Turns out almost everyone’s grades markedly improved. Dave passed but Chainsaw failed. Aekian passed and Pam went all the way up to a B minus! Jerome, the guy who spent the entire movie in the bathroom and who I have not mentioned until just now, got a 91…and Anna-Marria has no grade as she is not a real student. Denise went from a ZERO to a 38. Denise…the black girl. Yikes again. Kelvin is impressed by what he hears and by the parents’ positive reactions at their children's minor improvements (I guess they’re mad chill about their kids being fed alcohol, eh?). Shoop is granted tenure. Kickball 4-eva!
Robin and Shoop take a stroll on the beach to celebrate his promotion. He asks AGAIN if she’ll go to dinner with him. She says “how about breakfast instead” before tackling him onto the sand. They start to screw. The movie ends.