Squeeze Play (1979)

By the low standards set by other films from director Lloyd Kaufman and his bargain-basement production company, Troma, the sports-themed sex comedy Squeeze Play is relatively coherent, telling the story of women forming a softball team in order to compete with their boyfriends, who often ignore the women so they can play ball. By any other standards, Squeeze Play is brainless, exploitive junk, a tiresome compendium of crude puns, dick jokes, topless shots, and, naturally, an epic-length wet T-shirt contest that concludes with a male spectator growing so excited that the contents of the beer bottle in his crotch explode forth in a geyser of white foam. And that’s not even the most vulgar ejaculation reference in the movie—at one point, Kaufman cuts from a scene of a man receiving oral sex to the nozzle of a soft-serve machine spewing vanilla ice cream. You get the idea. None of the actors in Squeeze Play is noteworthy, although some have an easy way with lighthearted comedy, but the lack of great onscreen talent hardly matters, since the characters are largely interchangeable. Similarly, the plot is threadbare. The guys ignore the girls, so the girls decide to beat the men at their own game, even if doing so requires such questionable tactics as employing cheerleaders in cutoff shirts whose gyrations and jiggles distract male athletes from their playing. In that sense, Squeeze Play is a typical example of how male ’70s filmmakers sometimes used quasi-feminist themes while trying to make objectification seem palatable. Even though Kaufman presents Squeeze Play with his characteristically irreverent, upbeat style, it’s hard to stomach a picture with so many closeups of breasts bouncing inside T-shirts, with an all-female team called “The Beaverettes,” and with an announcer remaking that a particular occasion is “a banner day for athletic supporters.”

Squeeze Play: LAME