Hollywood High Part II (1981) User Reviews

Don't bother. Really.

[emdoub · 1/10 · 13 July 2005]

I like 'B' movies. I like cheesy trash. I enjoy stupid exploitation movies. Even I have my limits.

The party crew of Hollywood High (none of whom look less than 25) have nothing on their minds but sex, drugs, and partying. This isn't the bad part.

The acting is hammish, but you really can't blame the actors - personally, I am impressed with their ability to deliver those lines with a straight face (or without heavy tranquilizers). I would not be surprised to find that the script was written by a horny, stoned middle-schooler. Scratch that - I'd expect better from someone in the 6th grade.

** Spoilers below **

The teens stop to taunt the cop (having coffee on the steps of his paddy wagon) on their way to the beach. The most intelligent of the witticisms is "f*** you!". The cop proceeds to dump his cup and thermos of coffee on himself, then apparently tries to kick-start the wagon. When it won't start, he runs to the front of the van and raises the hood for a moment. Without even reaching into the engine compartment, he then slams the hood and (bouncing in the seat as if he's still kick-starting it) starts the van and putt-putts off in pursuit.

Meanwhile, the kids have reached the beach and set out blankets, on which they immediately start making out. The cop arrives, orders them up against the van, and starts pat-searching a girl in a bathing suit. When she objects to having her tits fondled, the cop arrests them all at gunpoint and locks them into the van.

In the very next scene, the kids are back at school, grumbling about the cop having arrested them. One girl assures the rest that they'll get a chance at revenge.

They go cruising Hollywood Boulevard - which consists entirely of nighttime footage of the boulevard, without any sign of our actors. Cut scene to a living room, where they exclaim "gee, that was the best bash we've had in a long time!".

Some excruciating minutes later, our heroes find a couple having sex on the beach - Officer BadGuy and the "Miss Prissy" from school. They take pictures and further taunt the officer, who chases them on his motorcycle. The chase scene is run in fast-time, as if this is homage to the Keystone Cops (who should be insulted at how amateurish this looks) - and we see the motorcycle-riding officer fall off his bike, kick it because he can't pick it back up, glower at the kids who have stopped to taunt him again, then lift the bike and take several tries to restart the motorcycle. He again chases the kids, until we cut to a shot of him bouncing the motorcycle as the rear wheel spins, doing an excellent job of burying the back wheel in the soft sand - exactly as if this was his fondest desire. Once stuck, he again whines threats against the kids as they stop to taunt him.

Next, let's cruise Hollywood boulevard again - while, in the through-the-windshield camera shots, the background remains still.

I could take no more at that point. I don't care if the girls become beautiful and show enough skin to get X-rated - it's just not going to be worth the pain.

One of the most profoundly putrid pieces of lowbrow teen soft-core bilge to ever disgrace celluloid

[Woodyanders · 1/10 · 13 June 2007]

This simply dreadful teen comedy sexploitation dud centers on the obnoxious, immature and unamusing antics of six seniors from Hollywood High School: the shrill, shallow and stupid little jerks make out, smoke pot, drink booze and display all the charm of a can of rancid tuna. The limp direction fails to wring a single laugh from the slight'n'senseless script. Moreover, the incredibly hateful, irritating and unappealing characters suck all the fun and joy out of this putrid picture. The usually solid Gary Graver's strangely sub-par cinematography, the grating profanity-ridden dialogue (sample line: "We'd thought we'd feed you before we *beep*ed you"), the groan-inducing no-brainer crude'n'raunchy puerile humor, Doug Goodwin's annoyingly bouncy score (the cruddy theme song is especially unbearable), a dumb protracted poolside dance sequence, the painfully broad and overdrawn hammy acting from a lame no-name cast, the clumsy meandering narrative, and an insufferably ample amount of dull'n'draggy filler all sink this stinker like a 50 pound lead weight. Adding additional abject insult to already appalling injury is the fact that the DVD uses an ugly, murky, scratchy video source print. Not even the tasty abundant gratuitous female nudity can alleviate the mind-numbing rottenness of this absolutely atrocious turkey.

As Bad as Part I

[Uriah43 · 2/10 · 10 June 2022]

This film essentially centers around 3 high school couples who enjoy hanging out together after class. Most of the time they prefer to cavort on the beach but lately they've become the target of an overzealous motorcycle "Cop" (played by Con Covert) who hassles them every chance he gets. However, upon obtaining incriminating pictures of him in a compromising position with another high school student named "Chessie Beacham" (Alisa Ann Hull) things take an interesting turn for everyone involved after that. Now, rather than reveal any more I will just say that, although the title might indicate a relationship to a previous movie, it really doesn't have much in common with "Hollywood High." So, the viewer doesn't have to waste their time on the first film to understand what's going on here. But then, why anybody would want to watch this particular movie is beyond me as well as it basically relies upon an extremely simplistic plot, a weak script, bad acting and awful music. Not only that, but some of the actors looked much too old to be in high school as well. To add insult to injury, except for possibly Donna Lynn (as "Kiki"), I didn't think that any of the young ladies were all that attractive either. Be that as it may, while this may not be the worst "beach movie" I have ever seen, it was certainly bad enough and I have rated it accordingly.

Not much more than a curious artifact of the late 1970's

[lazarillo · 3 September 2007]

Although it was made in 1981 (as a sequel to an earlier movie I haven't seen), this movie fits into the strange category of 1970's "teen sexploitation" flicks. These kind of films really came into their own in the 1980's with stuff like "Porky's" and "Fast Times at Ridegemont High" after they finally figured out who their audience should be--i.e. horny teenagers (of all ages). With the earlier 70's films though it's hard to tell who they were aimed at. Teenagers is the obvious answer. But while rutting adolescents at 1970's drive-ins may not have been the most discriminating audience, when they did occasionally come up for air, it seems doubtful they'd relate too much to the idiotic caricatures of themselves in movies like this one, or "The Cheerleaders", "Jailbait Babysitter","Cherry Hills High", etc. Perusing some of these titles suggests that many of these flicks might have been aimed more at the dirty old men in what used to be called the "raincoat crowd". But most of these guys had moved elsewhere by the late the 1970's after the legalization of hardcore porn, and this movie despite abundant female nudity is pretty tame even compared to what these, uh, gentlemen were enjoying ten years earlier. (Nor are the girls in this movie too likely to have appealed to your serious perverts--they seem about twenty-five on average and have that ridden-hard-and-put-away-wet look of Hollywood casting couch vets).

But getting to the plot--well,there really isn't one. It's mostly just a group of stupid guys and their slutty girlfriends driving around engaging in allegedly hilarious teen hijinx with frequent interludes of topless softcore sex. In a strange way this like several other of these films ("The Pom Pom Girls", "Maibu Beach") kind of resembles the more recent, seminal film about 1970's teens "Dazed and Confused", but without the nostalgia, the self-conscious irony, the remotely likable (or believable) characters, or the even halfway competent film-making. They DO have a lot of obscure but oft topless actresses with real breasts (one thing about the 1970's that should make any guy wax nostalgic), but this eventually becomes a poor substitute for genuine entertainment.

This film is really little more than a curiosity, probably not worth wasting precious minutes of your life on.

No redeeming features

[lor_ · 8 February 2023]

My review was written in May 1984 after a Times Square screening.

Filmed in Spring of 1981, "Hollywood High Part II" is an embarrassingly bad teen exploitation film. Instead of including frequent dull stretches to allow the target drive-in audience to trek to the refreshment stand, pic is an 85-minute forced break during which patrons will hide out waiting for the next feature to begin.

"Part II" has little in common with Patrick Wright's 1976 original "Hollywood High" film, which features four young couples frolicking in surf and sand and having unfunny adventures featuring a Henry Winkler imitator called "The Fenz" and a Mae West imitator named "June East". Sequel is a plotless wonder featuring three unattractive couples making out, horsing around in class and waging a running battle with a local cop.

Sole story detail has the six leads snapping incriminating photos of the cop on the beach having sex with the class prude Chessie (Alisa Ann Hull), with the cop later blackmailing them in turn when he catches the boys cheating on their girlfriends by servicing a pair of man-hungry femme teachers. Film's cynical moral is that one has to go to bed with one's teachers in order to graduate.

Consisting 100% of padding and filler, "Part II"'s best use would be as anti-American propaganda if exported to the Eastern bloc nations, where its portrayal of U. S. education could be taken as documentary evidence.