Horny boys and hijinks: Porky’s is no-holds-barred, hormone-fueled nonsense, and it isn’t even shy about what it is. It was offensive when it was released, and—decades later—it’s only grown worse with age. Watching it today feels less like a teen sex comedy and more like a case study in how easily sexual harassment can get rebranded as light entertainment. This was a hit movie, lest anyone forget. An episodic sex comedy featuring a small handful of central characters (getting into their names or trying to describe them somehow feels unimportant) who pull pranks, get into mischief, talk about certain features of the (male and female) human anatomy, and try to get laid.
The poster doesn’t lie. The movie does indeed feature a hole in the showers of the girls’ locker room. A lineup of teenage boys takes turns peeping through it. The girls, inevitably, catch them. But instead of reacting with outrage, they giggle. One boy escalates things further by pushing a certain appendage through the peephole, which somehow gets even more laughs. Then Coach Balbricker (Nancy Parsons), the no-nonsense disciplinarian, walks in, catches him mid-act, grabs the thing, and refuses to let go until she finds out who it is. It isn’t long before she’s feverishly demanding that every suspicious boy in school participate in a police lineup. Except instead of identifying faces, she wants to identify… well, you know. The whole thing is crass and uncomfortable. But at least that particular gag commits to its payoff.
Other gags are flaming balls of cringe. For instance, a subplot involving an assistant coach nicknamed “Lassie” (Kim Cattrall). Everyone seems to howl when someone invokes her name, and when you find out why—well, you might groan much sooner than howl. Then there’s Porky himself—a gravel-voiced, cigar-chomping strip club owner who cons the boys out of their money by promising them a good time, only to drop them through a trap door into a swamp. This kicks off a feud between Porky and the boys. But somehow, even with Porky being reprehensible and the boys deserving what they get, all of this feels more mean-spirited than mischievous.
Overall, the film remains watchable. A collision of adolescent energy and crude spectacle. There are some laughs scattered here and there, of course there’s ample nudity, and—I admit—I kind of liked it. It’s loud and lewd, but also sold entirely on the belief that boys will be boys. Undoubtedly, this movie helped cement the myth of “locker room talk”—that boys naturally speak and act like the ones in this movie. But these aren’t even teenage boys. They’re actors in their mid-twenties. And if this “locker room talk” stuff was ever true, it was only because people had just come out of the movie house with Porky’s still fresh in their heads. Of course, this movie didn’t invent the genre, but it was the popular one. So it’s fair to give it a good chunk of the blame. Taken on its own, though, Porky’s is a hit-or-miss cultural artifact.