Swim Team (1979)

Several tropes of late-’70s youth cinema converge in Swim Team, a poorly made comedy about Southern Californian high-school kids navigating personal challenges while pursuing aquatic glory. Among other things, Swim Team is an anemic riff on the formula from The Bad News Bears (1979), a timid sex farce showcasing a parade of sun-kissed blondes (naturally, there’s a van tricked out as a bachelor pad on wheels), and a dimwitted celebration of inveterate partyers (two of the leading actors appeared in the preceding year’s bacchanalian hit Animal House). Writer, producer, and director James Polakof squanders nearly all of these elements, generating a movie that feels much longer than its scant running time of 85 minutes. Scenes of kids defying grownup authority figures are too few in number, and the film’s PG rating ensures that leering shots of attractive people in swimsuits never tip into sleaze. In other words, Swim Team is an underdog farce without teeth, and a T&A flick without skin. To the degree the picture has a story, it’s about the Whalers, a team with a long losing streak, partially because the on-again/off-again romance of star athletes Danny (James Daughton) and Erin (Jenny Neumann) makes the team’s roster unstable. For no discernible reason, overweight rich kid Bear (Stephen Furst) is on the team, though he spends most of his time carousing, drinking, and lounging. Things turn around when motivated new coach Johnny (Richard Young) enters the picture, and then a romantic triangle emerges between Johnny, Erin, and Danny. Will the star swimmers get over their drama in time to help the Whalers win a big match? Yawn. Polakof front-loads the movie with a lot of Furst to exploit the actor’s Animal House notoriety, but Furst doesn’t have the charisma to pull off direct-to-camera bits meant to frame Swim Team with irreverent flair. Similarly, jokes about topics ranging from a horny older woman to a little boy urinating in a pool to surly rival coach “Mr. Ouch” are inert at best, insultingly stupid at worst.

Swim Team: LAME