The Last American Virgin (1982)

★
I had a Karen once. Her name was Maria, so I get it. The Last American Virgin has this reputation for being brutally honest about the unfairness of unrequited love and the heartache that follows when the realization settles in that all your best intentions were for naught. Writer and director Boaz Davidson culminates his T&A show with this hard lesson, but he doesn't earn it because of his inability (or unwillingness) to present his characters as anything other than sex-starved teens looking for their next fix. The denouement is there for shock value. It does not serve the purpose its defenders say it does because the characters are shallow, the narrative is scattershot, the sex is sleazy, and the acting is substandard, which prevents us from being truly invested in the story.

Gary (Lawrence Monoson), Rick (Steve Antin) and David (Joe Rubbo) are three high school buddies who are desperate to lose their virginity. An early scene has the guys inviting three girls (I recognized one of them as the student driver from The Naked Gun) to a party at Gary's house to make out with them and do drugs, although it was a ruse, as there is no party, and there are no drugs. This is a somewhat amusing sequence as the actors recite their lines woodenly before it ends with a surprise from Gary's parents. Eventually Gary sets his sights on Karen (Diane Franklin), the new girl in school who also attracts Rick's attention much to Gary's chagrin. For most of the movie, Gary is on the outside looking in while Rick and Karen spend more and more time together.

In between this main plot thread are numerous side quests that branch out for no purpose other than to titillate. There's a thoroughly unfunny locker room scene in which dozens of boys line up to measure their erections to see who has the longest one. Later, when Gary delivers pizza to a customer and notices how horny she is, he returns with Rick and David to have sex with her in a pair of awkward scenes that look like Rick and David are performing a reverse Tommy Wiseau on her by aiming too low instead of too high. I was repulsed when the boys hire a hooker who looks hideous and acts the same way, making even an investment of just $30 per head look like a bad deal. If anything is funny about this, it's that the trio is not concerned with unprotected sloppy seconds.

During Christmas break, everyone goes on a skiing trip except for Gary and Karen, who by now has been dumped by Rick. Circumstances bring the two together, and there is a moment during which they connect and finally have a conversation that could lead to something special. This whole sequence builds in a way that is touching and might have partly salvaged the movie, but it doesn't because Boaz Davidson rushes through it and cuts to Karen's birthday party where he takes the story down an unexpected path that is completely believable for anyone who has been in similar situation but not so impactful due to the lack of context behind it. I suspect that male viewers strongly identified with Gary because they all had a Karen, and they substituted Gary's misadventures with their own experiences to give the ending the coup de grâce that it aspired to deliver.

After over an hour of Gary's half-baked sexual encounters, we shift to Gary and Karen's alone time, but it is brief. Boaz Davidson devotes little time to this part of the story. Karen's motivation isn't clear, but then again, the teenage mind is a messy plate of hormones that fuels questionable decision making. Her motivation isn't required, but Gary's path needed exposition instead of Davidson simply pulling out the rug. The 1986 film Lucas deals with similar subject matter and executes it far more effectively. There, Lucas (Corey Haim) and new girl Maggie (Kerri Green) spent summer together before the school year started, so there was plenty of backstory there to set the stage for any challenges to Lucas's quest for love. The Last American Virgin doesn't do that. It is a teen sex comedy with few redeeming qualities.

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