School Spirit

My review was written in October 1985 after a Times Square screening.

"School Spirit" is a weak, low-budget comedy that arrives way too late in the overdone teen fantasy cycle. Announced as an Almi PIctures release last year, film debuted instead from Roger Corman's new distribution company in April 1985 in Atlanta.

Tom Nolan (imagine Michael J. Fox as a 6-foot-tall football player) toplines the overage-looking cast as Billy Batson (no relation to Captain Marvel), a college student who is killed in a car crash while rushing heedlessly home from a drugstore with an all-important condom to be down with campus beauty Judy (Elizabeth Foxx). His late uncle Pinky appears in the hospital as a transparent ghost to take Billy to heaven, but our hero, discovering that a hand motion (reminiscent of Curly's shtick for the Three Stooges) can materialize him as flesh-and-blood, escapes to stay on Earth one more day. Object: get laid.

With chintzy special effects, the pic's ghost gimmick is extraneous, mainly used for an obligatory scene of eavesdropping (invisibly) in the girls' shower room to ogle various siliconed cuties. Grainy photography, muffled sound recording and dinky production values all indicate that the picture was ground out carelessly as just another title for market.

Cast is sunk by the material, but executes the praffalls acceptably. Only surprise is the presence of a Corman mainstay of 15 years ago (in all those Filipino women's prison pictures) Roberta Collins as the perennially drunken wife of the college president.