Our Winning Season (1978)

          Rehashing themes from American Graffiti (1973), but with a milquetoast approach to storytelling replacing the visionary qualities of George Lucas’ enduring hit, Our Winning Season juggles the bland stories of several 1960s high-school students facing adulthood. Competently directed by Joseph Ruben, who has usually fared better with pulpy genre stories, the picture suffers as much from a lack of distinctive performances as it does from a lack of distinctive characters. Of the principal cast, three actors later gained notoriety, and none of them is is the lead. Future WKRP in Cincinnati costar Jan Smithers plays a young woman wrestling with whether or not to surrender her virginity, future Riptide/Jake and the Fatman TV actor Joe Penny plays the on-again/off-again boyfriend of Smithers’ character, and future A-lister Dennis Quaid portrays one of several interchangeable young men driven to stupidity by raging hormones. The actual leading man of Our Winning Season is Scott Jacoby, who plays an angst-ridden student athlete, and despite putting in a sincere effort, he’s ultimately as forgettable as his role.

          In lieu of a proper overarching storyline, Our Winning Season presents a number of interconnected subplots. David (Jacoby) struggles to overcome the feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing that keep him from achieving greatness as a distance runner. Meanwhile, his sister, Cathy (Smithers), breaks up with her tiresome boyfriend, Dean (Penny), only to reconsider their situation when Dean impulsively joins the Army and explains that he’s headed for Vietnam. Providing would-be comic relief are the misadventures of a teen Casanova named Jerry (Randy Herman), who juggles relationships with two girls at once. (One of Jerry’s ladies is played by cult-fave starlet P.J. Soles, whose presence in the movie is fleeting.)

          In terms of tone, Our Winning Season is all over the place. At its most desperate, the movie provides “wild” scenes of kids getting into trouble, hence the ridiculous shot of a car crashing through the screen at a drive-in theater. At its best, the movie aims for intimate drama with a special focus on the challenges that horny young men face when they first realize they must treat women as more than just sexual objects. Quite often, the movie lands in some unsatisfying place between these extremes. For instance, several necking scenes linger so long that they almost feel like softcore—it’s as if the filmmakers tried a little bit of everything, then cobbled the final movie together from whichever footage seemed to generate visceral reactions. Therefore, even though Our Winning Season steers clear of many obvious traps, the movie is as unfocused as it is unmemorable.

Our Winning Season: FUNKY

The Sister-in-Law (1974)

          Joseph Ruben, the capable director of escapist movies whose career peaked in the ’90s with glossy thrillers including The Good Son (1993), kicked off his movie career as the writer, producer, and director of this mediocre but occasionally interesting drama about betrayal between brothers. Despite the presence of such a heavy theme, the movie was crudely marketed by Crown International Pictures to emphasize erotic elements. Yet it’s not as if Ruben’s cinematic debut deserved classier distribution, because the filmmaker’s inexperience shows in every aspect of The Sister-in-Law. For instance, Ruben failed to construct a sufficiently complicated plot, so The Sister-in-Law is filled with aimless scenes that don’t move the story forward, including a number of dull montages set to twee folk songs that were composed and sung by the movie’s star, John Savage. A unique actor whose persona blends eccentricity with sensitivity, Savage could be extraordinary in the right context (notably 1978’s The Deer Hunter), but he’s never evinced a leading man’s charisma. In The Sister-in-Law, he gives what’s best described as a character actor’s performance, all moods and quirks instead of a strong presence.

          Savage plays Bobby, an aimless young man who just completed a year and a half of wandering America. Returning to the Westchester, New York, mansion of his brother, successful novelist Edward (Will MacMilian), Bobby strikes up an affair with his sister-in-law, Joanna (Anne Saxon). Meanwhile, Edward has gotten mixed up in transporting illicit items for the Mob—it’s been a while since he made money off books—so Edward pressures Bobby into making a run across the Canadian border on Edward’s behalf. To sweeten the deal, Edward says Bobby can take Edward’s sexy young mistress, Deborah (Meridith Baer), along for the ride. Once Bobby discovers that he’s been duped into smuggling drugs, things go downhill quickly.

          On the plus side, the storyline has all sorts of potential for lurid and topical thrills. On the minus side, Ruben’s storytelling is so choppy that for the first half of the movie, it’s difficult to discern such simple facts as how certain characters are related to each other. Furthermore, Ruben expends so much energy delivering the B-movie goods (read: female nudity) that more important narrative considerations get short shrift. The piece comes together in the end, but it’s a bumpy ride. Somewhat compensating for the movie’s shortcomings, however, is a florid dialogue style that occasionally leaps from pretentious to surreal. Early on, Joanna hisses to Edward, “Every beast ought to lick his own wounds—so go off somewhere and lick.” Later, Edward says to Bobby, “You have more shame over a dollar bill than you do about your own penis.” Rest assured, context doesn’t make these lines any better, but at least the dialogue has more vitality than the rest of the movie.

The Sister-in-Law: FUNKY

The Pom Pom Girls (1976)

Rather than being the sexy romp its marketing materials promise, The Pom Pom Girls is a boring hodgepodge of clichéd teen-cinema tropes. The picture throws together cheerleading, dating, drinking, driving, football, pranks, rebellion, and sex, but fails to generate interest because the characters are so anonymous and the storyline is so enervated. In fact, one must exercise tremendous generosity to suggest that The Pom Pom Girls even has a storyline, since the movie is really just a series of vignettes about teenagers making mischief. Filmmaker Joseph Ruben, who later scored with big-budget thrillers including Sleeping With the Enemy (1991), co-wrote and directed this drive-in dud for the schlock merchants at Crown International Pictures as one of his first projects. Ruben assembled a cast of attractive young people, some of whom periodically disrobe, but The Pom Pom Girls doesn’t even have the conviction of a proper exploitation movie; in lieu of truly raunchy scenes, the picture offers such tame distractions as a cafeteria food fight, a dirt-bike race, and a “chicken run” climax borrowed, shamelessly, from the adolescent-angst classic Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The main characters are football star Jesse (Michael Mullins) and reckless classmate Johnnie (Robert Carradine), along with their girlfriends, cheerleaders Laurie (Jennifer Ashley) and Sally (Lisa Reeves); these leading actors give performances running the gamut from barely adequate to forgettable. The movie tracks the main quartet’s rivalry with students from a neighboring school, as well as the group’s romantic entanglements. While a smidgen of dramatic conflict emerges during arguments between Jesse and his coach (James Gammon), most of the film’s screen time is wasted on trite situations: patrons at a drive-in restaurant getting impatient because the carhop is humping a customer in a van, teenagers stealing a fire truck in order to hose down a rival school’s football team during a practice, and so on. As for the title’s implication that the movie will focus on cheerleading, Laurie and Sally don’t actually wield pom-poms until the 50-minute mark.

The Pom Pom Girls: LAME

Joyride (1977)

          Featuring a cast of attractive young actors, a somewhat lurid storyline, and the unique atmospherics of Pacific Northwest locations (subbing for Alaska), Joyride should be a distracting romp about ’70s youths seeking adventure in the boonies. Weirdly, however, good intentions derailed the movie’s potential. Instead of being light entertainment with a sprinkling of sex and violence, Joyride sits uncomfortably on the fence between comedy and drama, and the film’s storyline is over-plotted. Lots of things happen, but they aren’t compatible with each other, and they don’t contribute to an overall impact. In trying to do a lot, the filmmakers somehow accomplished very little.

          The picture begins in L.A., where friends Scott (Desi Arnaz Jr.) and John (Robert Carradine), together with John’s girlfriend, Susie (Melanie Griffith), decide to leave the big city for a new life as independent salmon fishers in Alaska. Arriving in the 49th state, the kids are chagrined to discover that work won’t be as easy to come by as they expected. The trio is also riven by romantic tension; not only does Scott lack a female companion, but some degree of threesome activity is implied. The story gets turgid once Scott and John start mixing it up with locals, because Joyride grinds through repetitive scenes of bar fights and such—a thread that culminates with a silly pissing-contest scene—until a fourth member joins the main group. She’s Cindy (Anne Lockhart), a sexy local who’s alternately presented as a prostitute, a tease, and a co-conspirator in a criminal enterprise. After hooking up with Scott, Cindy participates in a strange scheme whereby the Los Angelenos “kidnap” her and seek ransom from her employer, a pipeline company. Whatever.

          Directed and co-written by admirable B-movie helmer Joseph Ruben (who later scored with pictures including the 1991 Julia Roberts thriller Sleeping With the Enemy), this American International Pictures release features a likeably loose vibe and stronger production values than those of the average AIP joint; the abundant location photography of open spaces covered with brooding skies lends credibility. But given the lack of a meaty central storyline, the picture sprawls across 92 logy minutes without any sense of purpose. Even the gimmick of all four leads being second-generation actors doesn’t add anything beyond a marketing hook. (Each of the four actors is okay in his or her undemanding role, with Arnaz the weakest link, but none does anything particularly special.) So, while there’s plenty of diverting stuff in Joyride, from the pop-song score peppered with Electric Light Orchestra hits to the topless scenes featuring Griffith and/or Lockhart, Joyride ends up feeling like a movie caught in an identity crisis. Is it a counterculture story about youths looking for a simpler life away from civilization? Is it a lovers-on-the-run crime saga? Is it a melodrama about romantic entanglements? Actually, it’s all of those things—and less.

Joyride: FUNKY