The mid-'80s success of group-centered comedies spawned a cottage industry, with one raunchy farce after another promising to do for some group what Animal House did for fraternities and Police Academy did for the police. Director Jackie Kong was a giant of the field, directing a 1984 Murray Langston vehicle (Night Patrol) that did for the police what Police Academy did for, um, the police. But instead of stopping there, Kong forged ahead with 1987's The Underachievers, a film that set its satirical sights on the last sacred cow of Western society: night school. Edward Albert stars as a typical night-school student, a headband-sporting, washed-up bush-leaguer coerced by the police into looking after the hot-to-trot, night-school-attending wife of a high-school buddy turned mobster. Alas, Jefferson Hawthorne is no ordinary night school, as its student body is composed largely of beer-drinking miscreants, masked wrestlers, convicts forced to choose between night school and jail, and other ne'er-do-wells whose commitment to quality education seems questionable at best. "I wouldn't let these scum-sucking douchebags step on my shit, let alone teach them!" screams one indignant educator, no doubt to the chagrin of countless scum-sucking students eager to step on her excrement. But not all of Hawthorne's teachers share her disdain for the school's colorful student body: When the alternately snooty and nudity-prone faculty decides to sabotage the free night school, Albert and pretty teacher lady Barbara Carrera join forces to fight them, first by beating the hell out of an elderly schoolmarm whose work doesn't meet their high standards. After their campaign of elder abuse fails, the two try everything from nun impersonation to blackmail to a winner-takes-all tennis match with Carrera's honor and the school's future at stake. But at Jefferson Hawthorne, as in real life, lasting social change comes not through winning a tennis match with a snooty, sex-obsessed teacher, but through hard work, perseverance, and the occasional montage sequence in which night-school students excel at their classwork.
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