#59 Surf School (Wes)

Surf School

Surfing is a bit of a mystery to me. I sort of liked watching it when I was younger and I enjoy the culture that has grown around it, but as a sport it’s just a bit odd. At least with similar dry land sports like skateboarding or BMXing, you have the surface that you’re doing tricks on permanently there. With surfing you’re entirely dependent on the waves. I guess it doesn’t help being British. When I think of surfers, they’re either far away in California, South Africa or Australia, or they are local and own a VW Camper that proudly displays stickers about how much they "live to surf", that hasn’t moved from their driveway in twenty years. The next movie on our list was a comedy I’d never heard of called Surf School, perhaps this could enlighten me into the true appeal of surfing…

When Jordan (Cory Sevier) decides he wants to humiliate the school surfer bullies, he takes his friends, the usual freaks and misfits in school, including a goth girl, a punk, a chronic virgin and a Japanese exchange student who doesn’t speak English, and go to Costa Rica to enter a surfing championship. However since none of them can actually surf, they enrol in a surf school taught by the permanently wasted Rip (Harland Williams). As they try to learn to surf, they learn about themselves and become who they really are. Something like that anyway. Just take any teen movie about nerds trying to beat the jocks and come of age and you pretty much have the story.

The first thing I have to mention about this film is the title song. It’s obviously called Surf School, as that’s pretty much all they say in the song. It must have taken about the same amount of time to write as 2 Unlimited’s lyrically challenged song No Limits. Unfortunately the makers of this movie only seem to have been able to commission this song and another one about a “sexy monkey” (more about that later) from a band that I assume was busking outside their offices one day, and these songs crop up sporadically for much of the film. It’s as irritating as the constant repetition of the song Holiday Road throughout National Lampoon’s Vacation, but just doesn't have the rest of the charm that movie had to make up for it.

Of course an irritating song can’t completely ruin a movie on it’s own, and that’s where pretty much everything else about this movie comes into play. This movie is like someone took all the best ideas from American Pie, Revenge of the Nerds and National Lampoon’s Animal House and then discarded them all and replaced them with clichéd crudeness, without any of the wit.

Take Larry (Lee Norris) and his ongoing quest to lose his virginity. Whilst in American Pie the mishaps that each of the boys faced (especially Jim played by Jason Biggs), were cringe inducingly embarrassing or just plain crude, they made you laugh. They were also really sweet, and you found yourself rooting (not literally though) for the boys and their mission to get laid. In this movie you just don’t care. The writers were so desperate for ideas that they even resorted to adding a chimpanzee to the movie that for some reason is attracted to Larry. It all of course leads to the chimp spanking Larry in a “hilarious” twist of being spanked BY the monkey! Even Ray Charles, sat at the bottom of a mineshaft deep under the floor of The Pacific Ocean could have seen that one coming (also is it too much to point out to the makers of this movie that Chimps are APES?). Actually I’d like to think that it’s almost as though somebody didn’t quite understand the title of BJ and The Bear and thought that chimps and BJs were quite common to put on the screen together. That would be funny at least…

In general, the characters are just so immediately forgettable and their exploits are so predictable that you could walk away from the movie for half an hour and pick up the story again immediately. When they’re not so forgettable that you think they’re introducing new people to the movie every scene, they’re just plain annoying. The surf instructor Rip has a running joke (I say that, but I didn’t laugh once. Shall we call it a running catchphrase) where he keeps saying “mahi-mahi” as though it’s the funniest name for a cocktail that’s ever been conceived (or perhaps it is about the actual fish, even the writers seem confused about this). In fact even though I know I’ve seen him in other things, the only time I can ever remember a performance by Harland Williams is as the hitchhiker in There’s Something About Mary. I admit that he was funny in that, but perhaps that sums him up. A couple of scenes as an off-the-wall type character is fine, but a large part in a movie is just irritating. He’s every surf waster cliché rolled into one character and it just gets very boring, very fast.

To make matters even worse, the makers don’t just use the same ideas that have been done to death, they pretty much rip off other movies too. There’s one point where the boys are given microscopic crabs to put in the pants of the surfer bullies (and their girlfriends), a ruse that is strikingly similar to the nerds coating the jocks jockstraps in hot sauce in Revenge of the Nerds.

If I haven’t made it clear how derivative this movie is yet, I’ll leave it to you to guess what happens to the goth girl, Doris (Laura Bell Bundy). Just a small hint… Have you seen movies such as The Breakfast Club or She’s All That? Was that a yes?  There’s your answer. I’m really not sure why Hollywood is so obsessed with perpetuating the myth that people look so much better with blonde hair and a tan, but I suspect they may have been watching too much Rocky Horror Picture Show.

This film is the epitome of all that’s bad about lazy filmmaking. Instead of trying to think of something the audience haven’t seen they just wheel out the same tired old jokes that it’s like the cinematic equivalent of a clipshow episode of your least favourite tv show. The acting is sub-par as expected and the filmmakers put in as many gratuitous arse and tit shots just to keep the audience paying attention, as though even they were aware that even the terminally stoned wouldn’t have patience to sit through this.

If you want to watch a movie about surfing, then may I suggest Big Wednesday, Lords of Dogtown, or one of the many great documentaries about the sport. If you want a coming of age comedy, then there are so many out there that do the job better than this. Just please don’t waste your time with this movie. Perhaps if people stop paying to see movies like these we can finally WAVE goodbye to them for good… (Sorry. But it’s still funnier than anything in Surf School).