Lust, caution
The Believer looks at the golden age of teen sex comedies:
Presided over by the climate of Animal House (1978), the teen sex comedies have taken nudity cues from ’70s grindhouse teensploitation (e.g. The Cheerleaders and, to a lesser extent, H.O.T.S., an inferior precursor to the college-farce masterpiece Revenge of the Nerds), which is basically soft-core pornography, and they draw also, especially for setting, from the sweeter nostalgic vein typified by American Graffiti and TV’s Happy Days. It’s an unstable mix that couldn’t last—nudity got in the way of narrative, and narrative got in the way of nudity, so the two main justifications for teen cinema were severely compromised. The teen sex comedies can be seen as a bridge genre between the quasi-porn and nostalgia pictures of the ’70s, and the more chaste and substantive post-Hughes teen comedies of manners that have ruled for at least the last decade (everything from Clueless [1995] to Ten Things I Hate About You [1999] to Mean Girls [2004]).
