Porky's

The film Porky's (1981), a vulgar teen comedy set in 1950s Florida with a mostly American cast, was partly financed in Canada during the tax-shelter era and thus qualifies as a Canadian film. The title refers to a redneck establishment in the Everglades that fronts a brothel. After being violently turned away on their first visit, a group of sex-obsessed boys from a local high school return to wreak havoc on the place.

The film made enough money upon its release that its executive producer, Harold Greenberg, built his Astral Communications empire on its profits. It spawned 2 dreadful sequels and has enshrined itself as the most reviled film in the Canadian canon. The reviews at the time of its release were so harsh - Variety called it "astonishingly vulgar ... has to be seen to be believed" - that Porky's has been dismissed as an aberration, a bad joke; however, given the vulgar comic extremes of later films such as American Pie, the juvenile, foul-mouthed humour of Porky's seems more like a harbinger of things to come.

Written and directed by American Bob Clark, who was working in Canada during the tax-shelter years, it won the GOLDEN REEL AWARD for the highest-grossing Canadian film of 1982. Porky's features a young Kim CATTRALL in an unenviable role as a gym instructor known as "Lassie." She would later achieve stardom as the sensuous Samantha in the popular series Sex and the City.

Author WYNDHAM WISE