Movie Review: 'Hot Dog....The Movie'

• Pros: Nice views of Squaw Valley and naked actresses
• Cons: Bad, predictable script.

If you came of age - or were the parent of a teenager - between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, you probably remember the romantic-comedy sub-genre known as the "Horny Teens Movies."  These were usually low-budget projects that married bare-bones plots centering on sports, cars, or any other male-oriented activity with a story which provided a bevy of hot-looking young women to shed their clothes and grant all kinds of erotic favors to even the nerdiest of the men.

Most of these "Horny Teens Movies" were variations of themes explored in such efforts as Private Lessons, Meatballs, Porky's, and My Tutor, in which guys - most of them virgins and labeled by the hot chicks as "nice" or "nerdy"  - simply had one goal in mind: to get laid.

Written by Mike Marvin and directed by Peter Markle (Bat 21), Hot Dog...The Movie is a 1984 teen sex comedy that is typical of its era and genre.  Starring David Naughton, Patrick Houser, Tracy Smith and Playboy Playmate of the Year (and current significant other to Gene Simmons) Shannon Tweed, it's a somewhat cheesy hybrid of ski comedy and soft-core porn flick.

As someone who doesn't have much of a fascination for skiing,  I have to admit that when I saw this during its theatrical run in 1984 I went to see the sex of the sex comedy elements.   I was not quite 21 and was a "dateless wonder" at the time, so I was one of those "geeky, girl-shy" young men Hot Dog...The Movie is made for.

The plot, of course, is thinner than a Trojan condom wrapper.  Hot Dog...The Movie's  main character, Hardin Banks (Houser) is an up-and-coming but not especially wealthy competitive skier who wants to win a World Championship Freestyle Ski competition in Squaw Valley, California. 

Talented and ambitious, Hardin is determined to beat Rudi Garnisch, a snobby and wealthier ski champion from Austria.  Played by former news anchor John Patrick Regan as an obnoxious piece of supercilious Eurotrash, Garnisch will not only be Hardin's rival on the ski slopes but also for the hearts (and everything else) of both Sunny (Smith), a girl Hardin saved from freezing out in the highway after she was dumped from a boy's car because she wouldn't perform a sexual favor, and the older but still way hot Sylvia Fonda (Tweed).

Just as World War II-era war movies had certain conventions (such as the ethnic make-up of a Marine or an Army platoon), sex comedies of the era tended to be ridiculously formulaic.  Here, Markle has Houser's Hardin (a name with a double entendre if there ever was one) teaming up with a group of misfits to challenge Rudi and his bevy of groupies, the Rudettes.   Starting off with top-billed David Naughton as a washed-up "hot dogger" named Dan O'Callahan, Hardin's misfits include a Japanese guy named "Kamikaze" (James Saito) and a grab-bag of hottie girls and low-rent Jeff Spicoli wannabes who manage to get a lot of sex while challenging some heavy European-sponsored skiers  in a clearly-rigged competition.

While the ski footage is interesting and the views of the many bare breasts are breathtaking, Hot Dog...The Movie is one of those films that's best watched once and then forgotten.  I'm not a prude nor do I have anything against movies about teenagers who want to get laid.  However, in the case of Hot Dog...The Movie,  I do object to its tedious plotting in the second act, as well as its script's lazy predictability.

The acting here takes a huge back seat to the film's two chief concerns, the T&A factor and its sometimes thrilling, sometimes repetitive ski footage.  When I saw this at the age of 20, the former was all right; none of the actresses/starlets were shy about baring their hot bods and at that age, that's basically why I had gone to see Hot Dog...The Movie.

Nevertheless, I also wanted to laugh and be entertained as well as get my quota of "eye candy" - and in this the film fails miserably.   The pseudo-Japanese antics given to Saito's character were not at all funny, and the non-sex-scenes parts were so predictable that I was always one step ahead of the writers.