"HARDBODIES"........"I DON'T F*** FOSSILS FOR FREE......"

Hardbodies (1984)    Here's the amazing thing about those early fun days of video stores......(and we know whereof we speak, having begun our long video-business career in one......)

               The sudden, exploding novelty of VCRs and video stores made movie renters (at least in these first years.....) fairly oblivious to the artistic quality of what they were renting........

                It didn't matter.......as long as you came home with something to shove in the VCR that night.......

                 If the neighborhood Mom 'n Pop video store was all out the hot new Hollywood release ("The Natural", "16 Candles", etc)..........hey, how about 'Hardbodies'?  Or 'Revenge Of The Barbarian Queen'?  Or "Bronx Death Warriors From the 28th Century?"

                 You get the idea. This lack of discernment wouldn't last though........as the years went on, customers would start turning their noses up at movies with 5 or 6 Academy Awards, let alone Grade Z junk....

                But in 1984, Grade Z tripe like "Hardbodies" flourished, especially in the wake of the runaway success of Bob Clark's sleazy romp 'Porky's'........

                 Originally produced for the defunct Playboy Channel, 'Hardbodies' was nothing more than softcore porn masquerading as a sex comedy.  Movies like this became standard late night fodder for the emerging pay cable stations like HBO and Cinemax.........filled with copious simulated sex and nubile girls baring their breasts every 3 minutes.

                 This one had three middle aged guys renting a plush beach house but clueless about scoring a hook-up with any of the toned 'n tanned bikini babes on the beach. (Repulsed at the sight of one of them, a bikini girl hurls that hurtful insult we used for this post's subtitle....."I don't fuck fossils for free".

                  The mid-life crisis morons hire Scotty, the community's premier beach bum to teach them how to make themselves attractive enough to get into the babes' bikini bottoms.  Pseudo-hilarity, simulated orgasms and vast amounts of terrible soundtrack songs ensue.

                  The only thing we still remembered of this from our long gone video store days.......Scott's doofus sidekick Rag (Courtney Gains, whom we're mentioning cause he was the only thing we still remembered...).

                  Rag's great talent involved knowing an endless amount of international hand gestures for "Up Yours".......(which prompts Scotty to exclaim to Rag's targets, "He's flippin' you off in 48 languages!"

                   Honest.....we're not kidding........in those Jurassic-era, glory days of video stores, you could easily rent out "Hardbodies" if all the copies of 'Ghostbusters' were out.

                    For 85 brief minutes......a quick nostalgic trip through our younger days.......for our faithful visitors, we'd recommend viewing it only as a quaint museum piece......and only if you're in the mood for this kind of 1980's junky softcore memories....1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2)  Everyone else attuned to today's culture may find it way too ghastly and incorrect to sit through.......