Once again, I had the pleasure of being a guest on Matt Poirier’s Direct to Video Connoisseur Podcast. On this episode, we discussed the 1991 skiing comedy, Ski School. Since the film was available on Tubi, I decided to do sort of a cross-promotion and make it a part of my regular Tubi Continued… column. You can listen to our in-depth discussion here: DTVC Podcast 121, "Ski School" by DTVC Podcast (spotify.com)
The “plot” is about the rivalry between the rich preppies and the drunken slobs who compete on the slopes at a posh ski resort. The preps resent the party animals and try to get them kicked off the mountain. Predictably, it all comes to a head during the big skiing competition where the losing team must leave the resort for good.
Ski School is reminder of the time when Police Academy’s popularity was on the decline. It seemed like there were a lot of imitators with the words “Academy” (Vice Academy, Mortuary Academy) or “School” (Bikini Traffic School, Stewardess School) in the title. However, the title is misleading because it really isn’t a “school” (although the characters refer to it as such a handful of times) as no one gives or receives skiing lessons at any point during the movie. (I think the only reason “School” is in the title is to remind that stars Dean Cameron and Patrick Labyorteaux were also in Summer School.)
Actually, the film is closer to the tone and feel of something like Animal House or Caddyshack as it uses the same Slobs vs. Snobs formula. (There’s even an indoor snowball fight reminiscent of the food fight scene in Animal House.) In fact, the whole premise was done a lot better a few years earlier in Hot Dog… The Movie.
It's also a sports movie, rife with all the sports movie cliches you’ve come to expect from an early ‘90s comedy. This is the least interesting aspect of the film. Not only is it predictable, but there are only so many shots of skiers flying through the air and flipping around in slow motion you can take before you start to mentally tap out.
The better part of the movie is all the stuff with the slobs playing pranks on the snobs and the occasional T & A. (Darlene Vogel, Charlie Spradling, and Ava Fabian provide the eye candy.) Even these scenes aren’t particularly great or anything (there’s a potentially funny scene about the lambada that goes nowhere), but they get the job done if you’re an undemanding fan of the genre. I think director Damien Lee was more comfortable helming action flicks like Abraxus, Guardian of the Universe, Moving Target, and When the Bullet Hits the Bone than he was with a comedy like this, which may be the reason some of the jokes fall flat.
I’m a big fan of Cameron. He gave one of my all-time favorite performances in Summer School as “Chainsaw” and is criminally underrated for his work in Men at Work. He kind of underplays his party animal character a bit (I think he probably didn’t want to get typecast as Chainsaw, so he went the other way with it), but is still funny, even if his best joke was stolen from Groucho Marx. (Cameron later appeared in a classic episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia where he essentially played the same character in a virtual remake/sequel to this film.)
In a way, Ski School is kind of review proof. If you caught this at 11:45 in the ‘90s as a teen back when it was in constant rotation on cable just to see a few boobs and have a few dumb laughs, it will more than certainly fit the bill as this was the exact sort of stuff that made having cable worthwhile back in the day. If you didn’t watch cable in that era at that time slot, then you probably aren’t the intended audience for something like this.
No comments:
Post a Comment