Screen Test lines up with a very specific breed of post-Porky’s gutter-comedy. This thing is deep in the 1980s sleaze wave – when the screwball sex farce had already burned through its own novelty. By ’85, things were getting cheaper, lazier, and obviously financed by the loose change found under the cushions of a producer’s casting couch.
So Screen Test doesn’t even try. It sticks to the simplest methods to deliver nudity, slapstick, stilted dialogue, and bad improv. The setup is barely there: fake auditions for a fake film, hijinks ensue. Send in the girls.
And yeah – the “character arc” of “guy wants to get laid and then gets laid” is about as rich as it gets. But what makes these films sort of fascinating is how being a sex-obsessed creep is a whole personality type in the ’80s. Being horny and desperate was half the pitch meeting. In that respect, this movie sort of works as an accidental satire of the whole genre. It’s almost meta. But let’s not worry about giving this thing too much praise – if Porky’s set the bar, Screen Test limbo’d under it and called it a day.
Looking at the box art, you could easily mistake it for something that got shelved on the wrong side of the beaded curtain. And like a lot of these films, you don’t finish it. You just stop watching when you’re done.