Moviecut—Sweater Girls

I have low standards. I watch all kinds of movies and sometimes I just watch things mindlessly. I have never reviewed a movie here, I usually don't care enough. But this one... Oh, this one. So, I guess this is literally one of the worst movies I have seen, and it wasn't even so bad it was funny. It was just bad. Most of it was fun fluff. At some point the guys got drunk and broke into a girls house. One of them attempted r*pe twice. He ripped off a girls clothes and chased her naked through the house when she escaped, and neither the guys or the girls really cared. The police came because a neighbour saw them break in and none of the girls gave away the guys. I'd understand being afraid to talk about s*xual assault in the fifties, in case she got blamed, but he broke in. They could've nailed him for that. But no. Ha ha, boys being boys, right? Another dude creeped on one of the victims who was changing, and later helped the other victim "out of her wet clothes" (she was pulled into a bathtub clothed) to creep on her. Then there was quick scene of him starting to kiss her when she said no and after a cut they were laying in bed together, Henry smoking a cigarette. So, full on r*pe it seems, but that one wasn't clear. Even talking her over into it is just coercion and not consent. Oh, also an older man tried to r*pe a teenage boy. The clips of the boy running through the streets at night, wearing just a towel, chased by the old man in a car were treated like little cutaway gags. That's right, at least three attempted r*pes in one 80 minute movie. I can't believe this is real. Even ignoring all that, there was no plot. Things happened, but nothing actually *happened*, nothing changed, nothing was solved, there was no character development for any of them. Just nothing. The attempted r*pist never got in any trouble. Pete was constantly treating one of his friends badly and cheated with that friends girlfriend and he never got his comeuppance. In the end it was implied he was going after said friends new girl. It bothered me irrationally that it was revealed the cop was Joella's father, and there was no interaction between them. Sure, it would've been fitting for him to see her having s*x after talking so much about what a lady his daughter was... Disregarding that, even if he just walked in the room when she was talking about architecture with Henry. Just an "oh, I didn't know you were staying with friends tonight". That could've solved the lack of an ending on the girl part, if he just said that he believes the girls had nothing to do with the prank, since they were friends with his little angel. The only one who could have had some character development was the "wh*re" who swore to wait until marriage and she was the one coerced into having s*x with the virgin. Oh, and that innocent boy that spent the night naked running from a rapist? The cop mistook him for someone else and put him in jail. What a mess.

I stumbled upon the 1978 comedy "Sweater Girls" here in 2021 by random chance. I have to say that I hadn't even heard about the movie prior to finding it. But I read the synopsis and it sounded like it could actually be a fair enough comedy. Well, I am sure that what writers Don Jones and Neva Friedenn managed to put together back in 1978 was fairly interesting back then, but it wasn't a movie that particularly impressed me. Sure, the concept of the movie was interesting enough, but as the movie came to an end, I must admit that I was sitting with a feeling of what was the point of the movie and the club that the girls founded anyway, as they essentially broke the principle rule of the purpose of the club to begin with. For a comedy then I suppose "Sweater Girls" might have been fun and enjoyable back in 1978, but it seems to have lost some of the flavor with the passing of 43 years. Sure, it was watchable, but I wasn't brought to laughing even once throughout the course of the movie. The acting performances in "Sweater Girls" were adequate. I wasn't familiar with the people on the cast list, which is usually something I enjoy in movies. But given the whole no-purpose-to-the-storyline then I feel somewhat indifferent towards the acting performances. I can now check "Sweater Girls" off of my list, and I can honestly say that I hadn't been missing out on anything grand here. And this is not a movie that I will ever be returning to watch a second time. My rating of "Sweater Girls" lands on a generous four out of ten stars.

SWEATER GIRLS coulda been a contender; in different hands, with a lot more creativity there is every chance that this project could have emerged as the breakthrough comedy that was PORKY'S just three years later. In any event, it is a decent time-waster. There were many soft * attempts to cash in on nostalgia for the '50s in the '70s, notably SLUMBER PARTY '57. Co-star (with Debra Winger) in that movie Noelle North is also a star of SWEATER GIRLS, but lightning failed to strike. The reason is that the "naughty but nice" sexy & comical antics are pretty flat & corny, causing the film to run out of gas early on. North and her girl-next-door co-stars (no real beauties in the bunch for some casting reason) form a Sweater Girls club, with tons of different color sweaters as uniforms. They keep changing sweaters, so the fans can get a look at their vintage, very-old-fashioned looking brassieres. Only one girl provides the bulk of the film's nudity (a bad mistake), Tamara Barkley as Lynne. Her career went bust (no pun intended), with barely a couple of Blake Edwards assignments in her future, and... out! With a decent enough budget allowing for cherry early 1950s autos and a fun Drive-In movie sequence, film begins promisingly, but degenerates in the final reels into a static, unfunny mess in one of the girl's homes. Sexual initiation of a nerd is poorly done, and the "*" of the group, Julie Parsons as Loella, is miscast -she comes off as more of a good girl for my money. She graduated to an equally unsuccessful movie from the briefly prominent filmmaking team of Jesse Vint and Max Baer Jr., HOMETOWN USA, and... out! (Parenthetically, I once received an incredibly long rebuttal letter directly from Jesse after I panned his goof-ball magnum opus ANOTHER CHANCE, caught at a Cannes Market screening. I ain't retracting anything!) Another miscasting is Jack O'Leary as a big fat local sheriff who spends the movie stealing the underage boys' cases of beer in a gag repeated over & over & over. He's dead space on screen, in a role that Jonathan Winters could have hit out of the ballpark. Most misleading element of SWEATER GIRLS is the appearance at the end of the film for about 30 seconds of TV superstar-of-the-future Charlene Tilton. She is strikingly beautiful at age 19, which merely shows up the homeliness of the film's actual stars. Filmmaker Don Jones is clearly competent, as this film is technically well-directed -it just lacks any sort of inspiration. I played a very small part in his unsuccessful career: when I caught Jones' THE LOVE BUTCHER playing on Forty Deuce circa 1982 I reviewed it for Variety, giving it a (relative to its genre) rave. This elicited a brief feud with no less than Harlan Ellison, who wrote a letter to the editor published in Daily Variety (our companion newspaper on the Left Coast) taking a holier-than-thou stance, extremely displeased with my praise/endorsement of torture-*, as opposed to the intellectual approach to sci-fi and fantasy that he has always adhered to in his writing. That tempest in a teapot briefly called attention to Jones' work, but he retreated immediately into obscurity and his later films were decidedly of less interest.

SWEATER GIRLS is a low budget high school sex comedy. It's short fairly well and I did like the characters and performances which are much better than I'd hoped for given the genre, but they're mired in a non-firing narrative structure which ends up boring the viewer rather than involving them. The setting is the 1950s and the popularity of GREASE might be the reason for that. A group of put-upon high school students find themselves chased endlessly by guys with one thing on their minds and they form the titular club. At this point the story doesn't really go anywhere and we're left with gratuitous nudity to fill up the rest of the running time.