Screwball Hotel

Its hard to pin down the beginning or end of any Era, but this film pretty much signals the end of the Glam 80's, imploding under the weight of Big Hair, Padded Shoulders and the plastic emotions of the decade of sleazy innocence. Every cliché' of the age seems gathered together for dismal effect. It seems to be a parody of itself, as if realising that the decade it portrays is already in decay. Not that any insight was in the mind of anyone making this garbage. In a mild touch of irony, Kelly Monteith was, surprisingly, really big in the UK with his BBC2 show in the early 80's. His mixture of skits and talking to the audience were cutting edge comedy at the time. Breaking the 'Fourth Wall' ushered in a new comedic style. And this is how it ended. Who would have figured Mr Monteith as the barometer of a cultural Era?

The third entry into the Screwballs saga must have the biggest budget, but the lowest number of tickets sold. It manages a better location, some costumes, and more pretty girls (who mostly keep their clothes on) but that's about it. It's also pretty tedious endurance test toward the end, though it does have a few funny moments. I can't believe Zielinski didn't attempt to recreate the phony doctors examine the girls milestone he erected, and paid homage to, in the first and second movie. Instead we get a hotel manager who apparently likes to role play with his wife, but not for the erotic possibilities of roleplay: he's more interested in appearing in disguise as Indiana Jones and the shark from Jaws. As I said, it's short on laughs, shorter on nudity, and has no eroticism, either.

The kindest thing I can say about this utterly dismal, none-more-eighties (sunglasses indoors, hawaiian shirts, mullet hairstyles, rolled-up jacket sleeves...it's all there) teen raunch flick is that the film does boast an impressive central location in the shape of the hotel itself. Apart from that, it's a mess. It's as if the worst elements of the Porky's series, the Police Academy series after the departure of Steve Guttenberg, any John Hughes film made after Sixteen Candles and the Naked Gun team on an off day were left on a shelf to rot, then some bored studio drudge stapled them all together and the result was Screwball Hotel. It's a crying shame, not to mention a scandal, that the original CREEPSHOW has yet to see a British DVD release, but this dreck is taking up valuable space on the shelves of your local Virgin megastore. And it's not even a budget release...