I wish there was a better way to describe Hardbodies as anything other than an airheaded bimbo of a film, but… it’s pretty much just an airheaded bimbo of a film.
There’s a sense in which this might be considered comforting… the genuine lack of anything even remotely resembling thought at least saves this T&A sex comedy from the leering, sleazy misogyny of most of the genre’s entries (mind you, this is very much a sliding scale). So at least it doesn’t leave quite as ugly an aftertaste as it might have.
But still, this is barely a movie.
A delivery system for as many sets of boobs as humanly possible? You bet!
But an actual movie? Significantly less so…
The story (and once again, we must use that term extraordinarily loosely) involves Scotty (Grant Cramer), a scam loving beach bum that agrees to coach Hunter (Gary Wood), Rounder (Michael Rapport), and Ashby (Sorrells Pickard), three middle aged business men, on how to pick up girls.
Or ‘hardbodies’, in the parlance.
If that sounds like recipe for scumbaggery… well yeah, it pretty much is. But happily, the movie is too terminally unfocused to ever fully exploit (or even notice) the unseemliness of its premise.
(‘I didn’t feel gross while watching it!’ There’s your cover blurb, right there…)
Director Mark Griffiths went on to a prolific career as a TV movie director (his last credit on IMDB is… quite something), and that seems about right. There’s nothing spectacular in terms of style here, but he at least knows enough to keep things moving, never lingering on any moment or plot point for long enough to get bored (though after a certain point, the endless montages do begin to feel a little excessive). It all goes down relatively smooth (though your mileage may vary on that point), plus Griffiths manages to stage an unexpected watercraft chase that is genuinely impressive.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, our writers (along with Griffiths), Steve Greene and Eric Alter, never made it all that far in Hollywood; Alter went on to write a couple of kids’ cartoons, while Greene went on to do special effects for the cult classic Sundown: The Vampire In Retreat. But while the script they pasted together is no great shakes (if anything, the overwhelming looseness makes it feel like everybody was just making it up as they went along), the duo deserve credit for a few cleverer than expected lines of dialogue and for giving some of the female cast members the space to be as charming and funny as the men; they’re still wildly objectified, but in a genre that often seems downright hateful towards women, letting them in on the fun is a small but appreciated change of pace.
But for all the stuff it does right (or maybe just forgets to do wrong), it still doesn’t add up to much of anything at all; there’s no sense of conflict until very, very very late in the game when an increasingly scummy Hunter targets Scotty’s girlfriend Kristi (the late Teal Roberts, quite charming) for seduction, and even that winds up feeling as tossed off as everything else.
What the film benefits from is decent casting; all the performers acquit themselves fairly well and most of the characters are generally likable, with the exception of those that aren’t supposed to be likable (Wood in particular nails the kind of sleazy creep that most ‘80s movies would think is the hero).
Special recognition has to go to Pickard’s Ashby (who, in what probably wasn’t a clever in-joke, does more than slightly resemble famed director Hal Ashby), the only one of the “geezers” who seems ambivalent about this whole plan, and is perhaps not un-coincidentally the funniest and most likable out of all of them. For his charms, he is granted what seems like a budding romance with Roberta Collins’ Lana, a slightly more appropriate real estate agent… which goes pretty much nowhere.
The whole movie is like that in a way; plot shards and character beats that never really shake out to anything. It truly is more interested in contriving excuses for women to take their tops off, dopey gags, and wall-to-wall ‘80s music than even pretending to tell something like a story.
It’s just an amiably dim little movie, too fluffy and flaky to truly offend. If you absolutely have to watch an ‘80s T&A comedy, you could do worse than Hardbodies.
Mind you, you could also do better. But just keep in mind that if you do, you will miss out on all of this:
*sigh*
Man, that is classic Rounder…
SPECIAL FEATURES: The disc has no special features (not even chapters), presumably because no one involved with the making of the film remembered they had made it.
