Boring

Best movie of this year hands down!

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The third entry into the Screwballs pantheon must have the biggest budget, and the lowest number of tickets sold. It manages a better location, some costumes, and more pretty girls (who mostly keep their clothes on) but that's about it. It's a pretty tedious endurance test toward the end, though it does have a few funny moments.I can't believe Zielinski didn't attempt to recreate the phony doctors examine the girls milestone he erected, and paid homage to, in the first and second movie.Instead we get a hotel manager who apparently likes to role play with his wife, and so appears in disguise as Indiana Jones and the shark from Jaws.Also, if you remember (and who could forget) the character of Purity Busch in the first movie, in this one we get several, and the heroes disguise themselves first as nuns and then as prophets to fool them. I said we got more disguises, but I didn't say the disguises were at all believable. At this stage (or, if we're being honest, long before) the idiocy of the characters, or the jump you have to make to believe they are falling for this drivel, is so great that it becomes taxing and you just want the movie to end.As I said, short on laughs, shorter on nudity, and no eroticism, either.

I can't in good conscience give "Screwball Hotel" more than four stars but it is still a must see. Buried throughout what is otherwise a moronic exercise in low-budget torture are short vignettes between the hotel manager and his secretary Miss Walsh (Laurah Guillen). These inspired scenes feature their active costume and fantasy sex life, these assorted scenes are inventive and hilarious enough to belong in a much better film. Despite their almost nonstop silly coupling, the two characters never call each other by their first names; maintaining the executive - secretary formality as they do erotic takeoffs on "The Wizard of Oz", "Star Trek", "Raider of the Lost Ark", "Snow White", and "Jaws". At one point a bellboy dresses up in a frog costume hoping to make it with Miss Walsh.Miss Walsh is arguably the most erotic character in movie history (Guillen being an irresistible combination of cute face, killer body, and self-knowing whimsy). She surprisingly upstages Penthouse Pet-Of-The-Year Corinne Alphen (whose scenes are the only other ones worth watching) in the sizzle department.Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

Its hard to pin down the beginning or end of any Era, but this film pretty much signals the end of the Glam 80's, imploding under the weight of Big Hair, Padded Shoulders and the plastic emotions of the decade of sleazy innocence. Every cliché' of the age seems gathered together for dismal effect. It seems to be a parody of itself, as if realising that the decade it portrays is already in decay.Not that any insight was in the mind of anyone making this garbage.In a mild touch of irony, Kelly Monteith was, surprisingly, really big in the UK with his BBC2 show in the early 80's. His mixture of skits and talking to the audience were cutting edge comedy at the time. Breaking the 'Fourth Wall' ushered in a new comedic style.And this is how it ended. Who would have figured Mr Monteith as the barometer of a cultural Era?

The kindest thing I can say about this utterly dismal, none-more-eighties (sunglasses indoors, hawaiian shirts, mullet hairstyles, rolled-up jacket sleeves...it's all there) teen raunch flick is that the film does boast an impressive central location in the shape of the hotel itself. Apart from that, it's a mess. It's as if the worst elements of the Porky's series, the Police Academy series after the departure of Steve Guttenberg, any John Hughes film made after Sixteen Candles and the Naked Gun team on an off day were left on a shelf to rot, then some bored studio drudge stapled them all together and the result was Screwball Hotel. It's a crying shame, not to mention a scandal, that the original CREEPSHOW has yet to see a British DVD release, but this dreck is taking up valuable space on the shelves of your local Virgin megastore. And it's not even a budget release...