• Produced, written, and directed by Rick Sloane
• Starring
  • Linnea Quigley
  • Ginger Lynn Allen
  • Karen Russell
  • Jayne Hamil
  • Ken Abraham

The story of how I came to watch this movie is more interesting than the movie itself. (A common situation around these parts, actually.) Whenever B-movie reviewers chat, they eventually come around to our hobby-specific version of the fisherman’s oneupmanship contest: “Oh, yeah? Well, I once saw a movie that was so bad…” In this case, Chad of The Good, the Bad, the Ugly and I were taking a break from our normal sociopolitical debates and instead were trying to outdo one another with psyche-scarring cinema. It came down to an exchange; I sent him Bangers, which was actually on loan to me from Allen Richards of B-Independent.com. In return, Chad sent me his brand-spanking-new DVD of Vice Academy.

Everybody sing along: “One of these things is not like the others…”

I gotta tell you, it feels good every once in a while to get the sweet end of the deal.

Not that Vice Academy isn’t a truly bad movie. It’s knowingly insipid to the point of being grotesque, but it isn’t the kind of lingering bad that places an indelible shadow on your soul, in contrast to Bangers and a half-dozen other movies reviewed on this site. Build up a resistance by watching enough bad movies, and something lightweight like Vice Academy can be laughed off without a backward glance. Ha! Ha ha!

The trick, really, is to realize from the outset that none of this is going to make a lick of sense. It’s like it takes place in a parallel universe in everything in society — heck, everything right down to the basic laws of physics — is senseless and inconsistent. As soon as you’re free of such mental constraints as cause, effect, logic, and quality, it goes down quite easily.

“And if you miss the target, at least see if you can hit an SUV.”

As you may surmise from the title, there is a Vice Academy central to the story, i.e., a police academy focused on turning out vice cops. Not general-purpose peace officers who may well end up working in vice, mind you. And we’re not talking about cops going in for a special course to qualify them for vice work. No, in this academy, you enter as a brainless aerobicized bimbo, and leave as a brainless aerobicized bimbo with a badge. Unless you’re Dwayne (Ken Abraham), the single male in a class of thirty-odd women. But his main purpose is to be the practice dummy when the cadets are taught the most effective way to paralyze an assailant (let’s just say that his chances for having children in the future are slim).

Anyway. Our story, or semblance thereof, centers on a few of the students. On the one side, we’ve got Didi (Linnea Quigley), Shawnee (Karen Russell), and the aforementioned Ken — a trio of well-meaning slackers who arrive late for class and stuff. This means, of course, that they’re our heroes. There’s also their arch-nemesis Holly (prolific ’80s porn queen Ginger Lynn Allen), daughter of the police chief, who’s at the top of the class and loves to point it out. She’s the pet of the singular teacher of this fine institution, the harpyish Miss Devonshire (Jayne Hamil), who reports directly to the police chief and has it in for our heroic trio.

The plot engine is that there are only a few days to go before graduation, and each of the cadets needs to make a quota of ten arrests to graduate and earn a place on the force. Let’s repeat that: Despite the fact that they are not yet peace officers, they still are expected to go out there and hunt up their own arrests with no backup save each other. This despite the fact that they are, this close to graduation, just being taught how to disarm an opponent and how to fire a gun. Is anyone feeling safer yet? I didn’t think so.

Ah, the ’80s — hair so big, you couldn’t hold your head upright.

In one of those bizarre (but momentary) changes of tone more usually expected in Asian cinema, Didi and Shawnee on their night off (but dressed like they’re on duty, if you know what I mean) meet a battered underage pornstar who’s afraid to rat on her producers for fear they’ll kill her. Didi takes this kind of personally, and makes it her goal to bust the porn ring to make her graduation quota.

Okay, the heavy social conscience segment is over. Dressed even skankily than before, Didi auditions at the porn studio and becomes twitter-pated with the leading man, Chucky Long (Stephen Steward). She even maintains her cover through an entire sex scene (what a trooper!) before backups Shawnee and Dwayne come to her rescue and cart the porn crew away, along with the convenient evidence of their illegal activities. (More proof of a parallel universe: Who, in our existence, would force an underaged starlet to sign a contract that specifically referenced her real age?)

But here, is seems, producer-writer-director Rick Sloane decided he’d rather already be making a sequel, because the plot abruptly changes. Since Didi’s, um, dedication to her task has compromised the respectability of the case against the pornmeisters, those ten arrests don’t count for them, so now the threesome has one night before graduation in which to round up the requisite number of hookers and johns. This is helped by the fact that the hookers and johns are all exceedingly stupid. (At least it’s an equitable universe — everyone’s an idiot!)

Boy, it’s the foot that really gives this shot that touch of class.

That puts them on the bad list of the local crime lord, the Queen Bee (you don’t even want to know about her costume), who has managed to elude the police chief’s finest. When you consider that said finest probably graduated from this very academy, it’s really not that surprising. And in desperation, Didi calls the only person she can think of for backup. If you’re like me, you’re expecting that person to be Holly, so that they can bury their hatchet and join together against the bad guys… but no. The person at the top of Didi’s list is Chucky Long the porn star, whom she’s kept handcuffed in her apartment since the porn bust the previous day.

[tap tap] Is anyone paying attention anymore? No, I didn’t think so.

The concluding scene, I think, best exemplifies the poverty of this movie — not only in terms of budget (though that’s certainly in evidence), but also of real comedy or quality. The academy graduation? It takes place in an empty municipal park, with only the police chief and Miss Devonshire in attendance — no parents, significant others, nothing. Just a bunch of academy cadets in blue gowns, sitting on park benches arranged on the grass in front of a lackluster park amphitheater. Oh, and Holly, who has remained fully clothed this whole time (did I mention she was played by ’80s porn queen Ginger Lynn Allen?) accidentally has revealed that the only thing she’s wearing under her graduation gown is an unlikely thong lingerie ensemble.

I’m sorry, did I mention big hair earlier?

It’s a bad, bad, stupid movie, but somehow it fails to grossly offend, mainly because it doesn’t try that hard; even pissing viewers off takes a modicum of effort. Instead, we get the laziest excuses for humor and sexiness, as if the screenplay had a lot of placeholder notes — “Think of something funny here when we film it” — that no one ever followed up on. If you’ve ever wondered what a movie would be like if its only ambition were to be adequate filler on the old USA Up All Night when nothing better was available, well, you’ve found your answer.

And yes, as much as I like to poke fun at the pointless parallel universe, I feel duty-bound to point out that this movie has spawned five — that’s right, five — sequels. Maybe this is the parallel universe.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0