“Did someone say Florida? That’s way past McDonald’s, man.”

Justin’s rating: Firing off random warning shots is the proper response to hearing that people are from New Jersey

Justin’s review: It’s senior week — the seven days between the end of the school year and graduation — and idiot teens are gonna be idiot teens. What Everett (Michael St. Gerard, who looks like Fred Savage’s sinister brother) should be doing is buckling down to write a 40-page (!) paper that an overbearing teacher requires him to do to graduate. What he decides to do instead, however, is grab his two beef-headed friends, kidnap a local nerd, and abruptly take everyone on a road trip to Florida without any packing, preparation, or notification whatsoever because of [checks notes] “babes.”

You’d think that kidnapping a person and taking them across state lines would end in a dramatic arrest and a 20-year conviction, but you need to remember that this is an ’80s movie and is therefore considered hilarious hijinks. Also, if my friend suddenly started driving me 17 hours to a remote destination without asking my permission, I think that would mark the moment when we stopped being friends and started being life-long arch-enemies.

But… “hilarious hijinks!”

I probably spent way too much time tracking all of the stuff that these four guys end up wearing and using that they shouldn’t have had with this spontaneous, unplanned road trip. They should be flat broke with one outfit each, but no, they’ve got swimsuits and multiple outfits and sunglasses and even a word processor and printer.

Apart from seeing if any Florida beachgoers will actually give these creeps the time of day, the key tension here arises from two of the guys’ girlfriends and the aforementioned overbearing teacher who try to pull a Principal Rooney and catch these misbehaving miscreants in the act.

Spring Week is one of far too many cheap photocopies of Animal House and Porky’s (both of which I say were pretty cheap anyway) that came out in the ’80s before everyone tired of them. When you dig into these, there’s that initial fleeting hope that this one… this one will be actually funny in an underrated way. But more often than not, you get cinematic refuse that does stuff like spring nudity on the viewer with cartoonish sound effects.

In all fairness, there are very sporadic moments where Spring Break stops clowning around enough to be a tad bit clever. Like, maybe three moments. But it’s sprinkled around a whole lot of trash. All of the characters are full-blown stereotypes — the nerd wears glasses and uses a pocket word processor, the fat guy likes to eat a lot and parties too hard, the teacher wears a neck brace and hisses at everyone, etc. There’s no real driving plot, no great conflict to overcome, no ticking timer. It’s an experience that keeps rolling along until it ends — with a school board court of inquiry, yawn — and we are freed from the pain.

And I can’t stress enough how incredibly unlikable the main three guys are. In any other movies, they’d be the evil trio of karate bullies that get their faces beat in the final tournament. Here, they strut and cheat on their girlfriends and steal hogies and live like slobs. I instantly loathed their smirking faces from their first scene together and never changed my mind. The movie itself has a hard time figuring out a way to make them look good, so the solution the writers came up with is to pit them against an attempted rapist. I mean, if that’s what it takes to prop your protagonists up, maybe they’re not the protagonists?

About the only thing I liked was the Florida cousin Debbie Sue who is extremely quirky and dotes upon her never-seen alligator pet. She’s borderline Manic Movie Insane, and I like her vibe. She ends up connecting with the nerdy guy and they make out in a bathtub full of whipped cream.

The only lasting legacy that came out of Spring Week was the fact that a real-life principal almost got fired when he rented out his school to the filmmakers… who came in and shot a bunch of topless scenes. Then the students protested in favor of him, TV and newspapers gave the brouhaha national coverage, and the guy got his job back. That right there is a more interesting movie than what ended up being filmed here.

Intermission!

• Lot of kids going to class in lingerie these days
• You can get an F minus if your teacher has it out for you
• Man, this teacher loves to overact
• Who would taxidermy their pet pigeon and bring it to school?
• Manny’s House of Ribs sounds very romantic
• If you have muscles, sleeves are optional
• Well this escalated to kidnapping very quickly
• What’d you do on your last day of school? Well, we ate a huge cooked turkey in my bedroom.
• Everett pulls out the “sick and/or dead mom” card too often
• That is the smallest word processor screen, you’d go blind using it
• Unicycle on the beach
• “Is that an alive alligator?” Yes, it’s Chuckles!
• This is like the oldest arcade I’ve ever seen in an ’80s flick
• The geeky girl taking a picture of her dinner, which was the birth of Instagram
• Dancing with the stuffed frog
• “I’m your host, Mark Farts!”
• “I hope it eats her too.” OK, I laughed.
• These dreams are all kinds of disturbing
• “Triple gizzard” on the pizza sign
• This sounds like the most disgusting pizza
• “Are these domestic sardines or imported?” “I don’t know, I didn’t check their passports.”
• “Anything else?” “Do you think there’s life after death?” “WHAT?”
• Why would he squirt the teacher full in the face with mustard?
• That’s a LOT of shaving cream and/or whipped cream. Either way, it’s gross.
• “Just let it happen!” OK there Mr. Rapist
• “You don’t know me, but I’m madly in love with you.”
• Back when it took 20 minutes to print out a 46-page paper. Also, where does he get a printer?
• Who left the keys in the ignition slots of all these dune buggies?
• Why does that scientist have a giant horn in his pocket?
• That’s the worst cop acting ever
• “Is that it?” That’s my reaction too, Television Reporter Lady.