My Tutor is another airy slice of 80's Teensploitation that much like Coach, deals with an affair between a horny teenaged boy and older, more experienced woman.
The setup is simple, Bobby is horny and desperately looking to lose his virginity before going to college in the fall. Which college he goes to depends on acing a remedial French course for which his wealthy father has procured him a tutor. His tutor is a hot, sophisticated chick. She tutors him in French, but more importantly, in screwing.
The opening credits, set to a totally bumping disco song, let you know exactly what kind of movie you're about to see:
Nice!
Bobby, the tutee, is played by someone named Matt Latanzi, a total 80's hearthrobby type, albeit with a hilariously girly voice. Turns out he was also in Xanadu where he met and married Olivia Newton John and who now lives off-the-grid in a tee pee he built himself. No shit, a tee pee! Half the fun of this whole Too Cool For School Collection is researching all the various players and what they did prior to these movies and since. It's a fun OCD nerd exercise for me. For instance, at one point Matt Latanzi fantasizes about fucking this gorgeous girl in a telephone booth. That gir,l who goes completely nude and has no lines, turns out to be Jewel Shepherd who appeared as the blue-haired punk chick in Return of the Living Dead (one of my favourite movies) and who now does the horror convention circuit where she lets random strangers touch her tits for photos. Do I need to know this? No. Am I glad I know this? Yes, yes I am.
When we meet Bobby, he and his friends are going to a whore house in order to rid themselves of their dreaded cherry's. One of the friends is played by a very young, fresh faced Crispin Glover. Aside from some TV, this was Glover's first movie role and anyone that thinks his oddball persona is an affectation can look no further than this movie, where all this freako mannerisms are in place and he's wearing wardrobe that could only have been selected by himself. My Tutor was made in 1983 and in 1985 Glover was playing nerd patriarch George McFly in Back to the Future. When you see him in this, Glover seems really, really young and yet just 2 years later he was quite believably playing Michael J. Fox's father.
Anyway, the trip to the whorehouse is a failure after Bobby falls asleep on the impossibly busty Kitty Natividad and Glover is chased around by a crazed S&M madame. Bobby starts moping, figuring he'll never lose his virginity, which is kinda implausible since he seems like he's 25 and he looks like the pretty boy from Xanadu. Enter Caren Kaye who is hired to live in their guest house and tutor Bobby in his French. After secretly watching her skinny dip in their pool a few times (despite the pool being in the family's backyard, she's constantly skinny dipping) he becomes fixated with his tutor. It isn't long before Bobby's getting tutored in French (well, off screen 'cause neither actor can speak any French) as well as the ways of the bedroom.
Much like Coach, the other movie in this collection that deals with boys fucking their superiors, no big hoopla erupts around this affair between Bobby and his considerably older tutor. Bobby's father even finds out about it and still it isn't milked for any drama or third act conflict. It makes me think that our cultures current obsession with all things "Cougar" is actually the by-product of a much more conservative moral climate, not the opposite. The image of an older woman sleeping with a younger man seems a much more provocative idea today than as it's presented in these 80's films. In Coach and My Tutor, the idea of a younger man wanting to sleep with an older woman and vice versa is just a given and doesn't even need to be explained.
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