“Can I Buster Help You?”
By the time Hamburger: The Motion Picture hit video shelves in 1986, the teen sex comedy was running out of beef. Porky’s had long come and gone, and the secret sauce was getting runny. The next wave of teen-appeal was decidedly more Hughesian, but this one didn’t get the order. Or maybe it ignored it on purpose.
Set at the Buster Burger chain’s corporate training academy (think McDonald’s Hamburger University), Hamburger has those Police Academy herbs and Revenge of the Nerds spices, but it’s served up without shame or seeming self-awareness. Like many of these screwball comedies, the setup is just an excuse for the sexy hijinks. Every beat is engineered for maximum adolescent payoff.
You get plenty of fast food puns (worse than mine), and wacky college-humour tomfoolery, but there’s no real biting satire here, just the self-confidence that everyone’s in on the gag. It really believes in what it’s doing.
Hamburger isn’t much of a meal deal, but it’s a deep-fried timestamp, a reminder of that mid-’80s stretch when teen movies were starting to soften up, but the bottom tier still hadn’t run out of buns or sausage jokes.
This one’s still worth a drive thru. -Pop