Joy of Sex's path to the big screen is nothing if not bizarre. Paramount Pictures decided to buy up the rights to Alex Comfort's best-selling manual of the same name, simply because they thought the title was marketable, and hired actor Charles Grodin to write a script. He did, about a struggling screenwriter trying to adapt said book, but they scrapped the idea (it would later be made into 1985's Movers & Shakers by a rival studio). Instead, and without any ties to the source material apart from havig one character glancing at the book a few times, they hired on director Martha Coolidge and cranked out what you see here: a harmless teen T&A comedy that's obsessed with sex talk, bodily function humour, and very little nudity. Yet, I still think it's underrated and entertaining.

A total staple of my youth growing up due to it repeatedly showing up on late night TV during the weekend, Joy of Sex takes place at Richard Nixon High bringing together your usual batch of characters for the first day of school. There's the innocent Leslie (Michelle Meyrink), the frustrated virgin Alan (Cameron Dye), the boorish yet loveable prankster (Robert Prescott), a new Militarian principal (Ernie Hudson), fish-out-of-water exchange student Farouk (Danton Stone), and undercover cop Liz (Colleen Camp) who somehow manages to fit in despite her odd behavior and obvious age difference.

As the main focus, Leslie, when she's not reading her diary aloud to herself, just wants to fall in love and discover sex. This is a process she's soon speeding up quite a bit when, after going to her family doctor because she's paranoid a simple mole might be cancerous, she wrongly overhears him talking in the other room about something and thinks he says she has three months to live. At the same time, Alan's upset he just can't seem to find the right girl to lose his virginity. Of course, this being the type of flick it is, you know their paths will eventually cross but on the way there scripters Kathleen Rowell and J.J. Salter throw out a whole slew of juvenile jokes and set pieces including a running gag with a mystery student who's been using superglue to vandalize the school, Alan's fantasies about his nebbish biology teacher (Coolidge regular Joanne Baron), a drive-in sequence that offers up the flick's raunchiest (yet still tame) joke about the fart-tastic "Blue Flamers", a semi-serious subplot where Leslie tries to help a fellow pregnant student from being kicked out of school and getting into a situation with a sleazy local news anchor, and a bunch of amusing moments culminating in a dopey finale involving a wild prom night party at a nearby bar/hotel.

While this isn't nearly as tasteless and vulgar as most of its ilk, Joy of Sex is still a watchable time thanks to having an extremely likeable cast and better characterizations than you'd expect. Meyrink's girl-next-door performance makes you like Leslie even if she's a bit dense at times while Dye (Fraternity Vacation) makes an affable male protagonist. But they're both overshadowed by the supporting cast as Prescott and his heavily-taped black rimmed glasses is endearingly obnoxious, Stone plays the clueless "foreigner" with a barely hidden smirk, and the still busy Camp (who was thirty when this was made) gets to thrust out her chest a lot while constantly popping gum and giving some awesomely stilted (on purpose) line delivery. It's also worth noting Baron's orgasmic tone during lessons about animal reproduction, Hudson's brief bad-ass turn, and Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future, "Taxi") getting a few chuckles as Leslie's gruff and protective gym teacher father.

Probably the most forgotten of Coolidge's output in the 80's (which isn't hard when you have Valley Girl, Real Genius and Going Undercover in there), Joy of Sex is a total product of its decade. Coolidge was actually fired after filming finished because of cutting out pretty much all the nudity and National Lampoon was once attached to it, which just adds to its fascinatingly wacky production history, but I still think it makes for pleasingly goofy entertainment if you lower your expectations a little. It's not on the level of such classics as Screwballs and Revenge of the Nerds, but it has enough likeable things to make it worth seeking out - which might prove difficult because it hasn't (and probably will never) had a DVD release. Luckily, it's currently streaming on Netflix so check it out if you're a fan of 80s teen comedies, you should get a few laughs from it. (Chris Hartley, 4/26/13)

Directed By: Martha Coolidge.
Written By: Kathleen Rowell, J.J. Salter.

Starring: Cameron Dye, Michelle Meyrink, Colleen Camp, Ernie Hudson.