“You’ve gotta be kidding.”

Drake’s rating: So is this where you learn vice, or what?

Drake’s review: You’ve all had those kinds of days, right? The ones where you wake up in the morning* and think to yourself, “Did Rick Sloane ever do anything else?” Sure, it’s entirely possible, and some might even say probable, that Hobgoblins was simultaneously the peak and the nadir of the man’s movie making career. Perhaps that film was a learning experience, and Sloane took from it the knowledge that film direction was a skill he simply lacked, and then he went on to a long and successful career in the upholstery repair business.

Yeah, you wish.

Because instead of restoring much-loved furniture to its original state, Sloane kept on making movies. In fact, not long after Hobgoblins wrapped, perhaps only seconds after, he launched what inexplicably became a series of brain-dead comedies that somehow managed to be even more moronic than the Police Academy movies that they were lampooning.

So, what’s wrong with Vice Academy? Well, let’s start with… OK, honestly, I can’t think of just one thing, because everything in this flick is bad. The acting, the writing (also by Sloane), the direction. It’s all terrible. I’m willing to bet that the coffee on the set was awful, simply because it was associated with this movie. There is nothing good to be found here. Nothing even remotely average, for that matter.

The story, such as it is, covers the going-on at a police vice academy, which is evidently a thing in this cinematic world. Linnea Quigley (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) is Didi, the Steve Gutenberg-ian lovable goof who leads the other goofs as they bumble their way through the movie. Her nemesis is the police captain’s daughter, Holly (Ginger Lynn, trying to carve out a career in non-adult films), the teacher’s pet who can do no wrong. As they compete to make the most arrests, antics ensue.

Unfunny antics, since this is a Rick Sloane movie.

So how unfunny is Vice Academy? Well, to answer that, let me quote directly from Justin’s review of Hobgoblins, because this flick has left my brain in a Jell-O like state and coherent thoughts are becoming increasingly difficult:

There’s nothing more grating than a film with no true sense of humor trying to force jokes and whimsy. It’s so cringy to behold, and you’ll be beholding it here from the start to the last.

That was true of Hobgoblins, and it’s true for Vice Academy as well. This is a movie that thinks it’s a comedy only because it needed a neat genre to fit into at the video rental store, and there was no category for “Humorless Waste of Time.”

On the other hand, the Vice Academy series filled up some crucial time slots on the USA Network for “Up All Night” in the 1990s, so that’s something. It even went on to win the USA B-Minus movie award for Best Movie in 1993, which was presented by a clearly out of his depth David Carradine and graciously accepted by Rick Sloane himself. So that’s something… else.

Granted, a movie where the attractive female cast spend half of the runtime gallivanting around in lingerie was probably a sure-fire ratings hit on late-night TV in the early ‘90s, but that alone is not enough to carry the whole 90-minute runtime. Unless you’re a 12-year-old boy in 1992 or so, in which case you might think this was the greatest movie ever made.

Hmm. I think we might have found the voter demographic for those B-Minus awards.

OK, I’ve done my due diligence for the week and warned you about Vice Academy. Now I’m going to go file this one under “watch at your own risk,” and if I’m lucky Heather or Al will pick up the Vice Academy ball and have a go at the sequels.

Ah, let’s face it. I’m just not that lucky.

*Or afternoon. Some Mutants are real night owls.

Intermission!

• Rick Sloane went on to make five more Vice Academy movies, churning the last one out in 1998. He also returned to the Hobgoblins franchise in 2009, making the sequel Hobgoblins 2. The finale to this fabled trilogy has yet to be announced.
• At the B-Minus awards, Vice Academy beat out Meatballs III and Toxic Avenger III for Best Movie. It was obviously a competitive field.
• If you recognize Karen Russell, who plays Shawnee, it’s probably not because of the many small parts she had in low-budget movies, but because she was in the Guns n’ Roses “Patience” video.
• OK, here’s a deep-dive bit of trivia for you: Daran Norris, who plays the “Laundromat John” in Vice Academy, went on to have a long career as an actor and doing voice work. If you’ve ever seen the “Veronica Mars” series, he plays the lawyer Cliff McCormack.