“Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper. Please report to the diabetes ward at once.”

Justin’s rating: Kind of a weird follow-up from Blade Runner but you do you, Sean Young

Justin’s review: In terms of source material for spoof flicks, the primary rule is that you want to pick something familiar and popular — otherwise many of your jokes are going to whiz over the clueless audience’s head. So I guess this movie felt that soap operas were ripe for ribbing in the early ’80s?

For me, soap operas were “that horrid thing that hogged most of the channels during daytime TV when you were sick from school.” Still, they had a loyal cadre of fans, supermarket checkout lane magazines, and their own bevy of tropes. And one of the most popular sub-genres was the hospital soap, such as General Hospital.

To capitalize on that, here comes along Young Doctors in Love, an ABC motion picture that basically applied the same zany irreverence of Airplane! to a medical setting. And darn it if it doesn’t take the ZAZ playbook and run it well.

Young Doctors follows a group of interns as they go through their first year at a hospital. But this is anything but a serious place of medicine, because it is rife with serious people saying ridiculous things, prop gags, slapstick, and medical conditions being used for comedic purposes.

And because this draws from the soap opera lifestyle, the increasingly ridiculous situations are also peppered with pretty people falling head over heels for each other. It makes me think of a magazine interview with a doctor when he was asked about love affairs in hospitals — to which he wrinkled up his nose and said that there’s no less romantic place in the world. But hey, it’s still a lot of fun to watch these weirdos get together in minor motion pictures.

For a movie that I’d never heard of, this one is crammed with some pretty recognizable faces including Sean Young, Michael McKean, Richard Dean Anderson, Harry Dean Stanton, Hector Elizondo, Michael Richards, Saul Rubinek, and Demi Moore. Young Doctors in Love was also the debut feature for director Garry Marshall (Overboard, Pretty Woman), and he’s no slouch right out of the gate. You also want to keep your eyes open for a little person doctor who keeps stealing scenes with a lot of background gags.

One of my favorite subplots involve a hitman (Richards) trying to kill a stroke-ridden mobster who can’t talk. Unfortunately for him, every opportunity he gets to make the kill is thwarted — resulting in electrocution, the loss of a kidney, and more. He ends up trapped in that hospital for seven months while a variety of procedures are done to him… and he still can’t kill his mark.

A foreshadow of Scrubs, Young Doctors in Love is a pretty funny romp that trades intellectual, safe humor for irreverent silliness. Like many of these types of films from the ’70s and ’80s, the gags don’t always land and the jokes aren’t free from being offensive. But it’s still a whole lot better than I expected going into this, especially with how little known this film is today.

Intermission!

• “Gently now.” “It won’t hurt!” “It hurt.”
• The door opening/closing sounds like Star Trek’s
• You can’t play b-ball during operations
• Anesthesoiologists like to pass gas
• “Oh God, he’s going to want a white cap.”
• The “white zone is for unloading” line
• “And find that duck!”
• Seeing the older outfits, ambulances, and other early ’80s medical stuff is a trip
• The mob aggressively clearing out a room of patients
• Popping the “pregnant” woman’s belly
• The Gallantino family always kisses on the nose
• Whole lot of urine tasting
• “You know some of these words have never been said in the state of Wisconsin.”
• Don’t try to assault a nurse who is lethal with a bedpan
• Punching people on the torso is a good way to teach where the organs are
• Intern, dance instructor, and umpire makes for three interesting jobs to juggle
• He cut his nose and toe off, and the doctor swapped the two… OK
• The exercise kids have names on their shirts like ‘Broken Home’ or ‘Orphan’
• Spit in the Lake sounds like a horrible game
• The nurse passing out pills while riding on a skateboard
• The flares around the patient kind of cracked me up
• “I come here to see our mistakes.”
• Don’t bite the buttons off clothes in a romantic setting, you gonna choke. Also, don’t make love in an operating theater if you don’t want to be observed.
• “You call that sex? Let’s try that again and not chat as much!”
• The snow globe in the IV bottle
• That doctor’s pretty good at improvising when it comes to copying keys
• “You say Ah-may-do, I say Ah-mah-do.”
• “Let’s go! It’s going to be a car chase! Door’s locked, no chase.”
• “Good job, Blind Officer!”
• “It’ll be just like any other operation you’ve never done before.”
• The Pacman tunes on the monitors instead of beeps
• Demi Moore’s one line: “Who?”
• You can tell the credits “not now” and they’ll back up