Team-Mates (1978)

Another shapeless late-’70s teen sex comedy that hides an exploitive nature behind a pseudo-feminist premise, Team-Mates doesn’t get a proper storyline until about a third of the film is over, and even then, the plot is secondary to loosely connected vignettes featuring feathered hair, pizza joints, and vans. Plus, like so many other drive-in duds of the same era, Team-Mates is a sex comedy without enough sex to satisfy the target audience, and without much in the way of real comedy. Pretty teen Vicki (Karen Corrado) gets tired of the way her football-player boyfriend, Brian (Max Goff), cheats on her with other girls, so instead of dumping him, she tries to earn his respect by demanding and receiving permission to try out for the boys’ football team. After all, Vicki’s the star kicker of the girls’ squad. Had that premise been the sole focus of Team-Mates, the movie could have become a passable battle-of-the-sexes romp. Instead, the flick gets mired in dumb subplots about anxious virgins, classroom shenanigans, and out-of-control parties. As for the main theme of gender equality, it receives lip service by way of clunky declarations from Vicki (“I want to be recognized as an individual!”). That the climax of the movie involves Vicki trying to score car rides to a big game indicates the overall witlessness of the picture. Incidentally, those who enjoy showbiz footnotes will dig learning that one scene in Team-Mates features Estelle Getty as a teacher flummoxed by a student who puts out a classroom fire by urinating, and that another scene features a drunken James Spader face-planting into a cake. Relatively speaking, these are high points.

Team-Mates: LAME