Customer Reviews

Surf School (Unrated Edition)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

With early comparisons to "American Pie" and "Road Trip," I wasn't expecting much when I saw SURF SCHOOL in its brief theatrical run locally. Actually, I *like* mindless, escapist fluff comedies, and was prepared for one of those here. What I found was one of the most gawd-awful 90 minutes I ever spent in a theater (which, incidentally, was EMPTY except for the two of us!)

The plot was simplistic but had potential: typical "fish out of water" scenario, with East Coast transfer student Jordan (Corey Sevier) feeling out of place in a Laguna Beach high school run by a group of championship surfers, led by Tyler (Ryan Carnes). He bands together with other misfits at the school, including a geeky punk, silent goth girl and a perpetual virgin nerd, and enrolls in a surf school prior to the high school surfing championship in Costa Rica. Got the ending figured out yet? No surprises, believe me.

Most of the comic relief is provided by the alcoholic former "surf dude" who runs the school (overplayed beyond endurance by Harland Williams), and a couple of oversexed 60's era hippies who run the place where they are staying. Whatever funny moments there are (including a running gag by Williams inviting people for "mahi-mahi" and a chimp "flirting" with the virgin nerd) are overdone until they lose their appeal. And the film is filled with patronizing stereotypes, from three gorgeous Sweedish tourists to the illogical choice of a flaming campy gay MC at the surf championship. The dialog meanders in illogical circles, leaving the audience scratching their heads in confusion and wondering if this was mostly ad-libbed. The outtakes over the closing credits are better than some of the scenes left in the film.

Only played - briefly - in a handful of theatres nationwide. The writer/director should consider some other line of work.

I get to see movies for free, I like to see movies: so I see a lot of bad movies. I like surfer movies, I like teen comedies, I like to see girls in bikinis or less: so I looked forward to watching this flick during its brief stay in the theater. Unfortunately, this film is not funny and the characters are types that have been done to death and the actors are achingly boring to watch. The photography is technically sound (kudos to the film crew) but the surfing is put to shame by movies like Blue Crush. So the film is boring as a comedy and as a surf film and poorly acted: What about the girls? Well, there are three very attractive blondes who play beach bimbos (blonde roles are such racist stereotypes) and who briefly bare their [...]. Other than that there's really nothing to see, not even any superior bikini shots. Question for the prospective buyer: are quick T shots worth $[...] for a used DVD and 90 minutes of your life? (I appreciate the loyalty to his friends in the movie by the reviewer who gave this 5*s.)

A group of American teens in Costa Rica learnt surfing and sex encounters.

Not much to watch but sexual explorations and handsome young male bodies explicitly reacting to beautiful female beach goers.

Nice entertainment after something more sophisticated or horrors.

I like some of the actors in this so I checked it out. I gave it two stars but I would have given it more if they would have shot Harland Williams in the head in the first scene...I mean for real not for pretend. (okay, I'm not really advocating any physical harm to Mr. Williams, just that he never step in front of a camera again.) What a way to destroy a movie by including that type of very low humor.

If like my granddaughter your chief interest in this movie is staring at Corey Sevier's ripped surfer's body (he was also the surfer in the short lived TV series 'North Shore') then you'll enjoy it no end, but if, like me, you like a modicum of depth to the script then you'll be bored to death. There are lots of characters who deserved much better development in this flick (the couple who own the place where the kids stay in Costa Rica are a genuine hoot). However if I have to hear Harlan Williams say 'Mahi Mahi' one more time I'll hurl....
There's some fun stuff...there's some dull stuff...there's very very little plot development beyond the obvious...and no surprises at all...but again my granddaughter sat enraptured whenever Corey had screen time so I guess it's got some redeeming quality within a certain narrowly focused teen fantasy world. Hence the three stars.

I'm the sort of moviegoer who likes train-wrecks of films--movies like The Room or Birdemic: Shock and Terror that are so outrageously, hilariously bad that they become perversely entertaining. A friend recommended this one to me as another in that vein, and... no. There are some moments of unintentional comedy--the atrocious surfing stunt doubles, the surreal monologues about Richard Nixon, the repetition every ten minutes of the painfully bad theme song, what can only be the terminus of Harland Williams' career--but these are oases between long, long stretches of an almost revolutionary kind of non-humor: failed attempts at self-consciously juvenile jokes the writers believe are deliberately bad. We're on third- or fourth-level irony here, and the liberating quality of bad "teen" comedies is completely gone; all that's left is a faint nausea and the intense urge to do absolutely anything else but watch another minute of this awful, awful film.

This fails as a "wonderfully bad" movie because its ambition is not toward creating a good movie but a mediocre one, and so its utter failure lies not in its pretense but its self-assuredness. If The Room is that sweaty guy who memorizes poetry and calls everyone "friend" and wears what was once a nice collared shirt absolutely everywhere Surf School is that guy with the sideways baseball cap who cracks loud racist jokes and who you once saw actually wolf-whistling at someone in the street. The first is easy to mock and is not exactly an innocent human being, but you can't really hold much against him and you can learn a few things about your own insecurities if you think about why you hate him; the second just has no right to exist.