Saturday, 24 October 2020

No.238 : The Teacher (1974)




The wonderfully named Angel Tompkins stars as the titular teacher who does no teaching but offers plenty of the rest. The film opens slowly with it reaching nearly 11 minutes before we get our first line of dialogue : “Damn”. We watch teacher Diane get ready and head out in her sweet Tran-Am. Meanwhile creepy Ralph is stalking her in his hearse - subtle! Diane heads to her cabin cruiser ‘Diane’ and takes it out into the middle of the harbour where she whips off her top for some chilly looking sunbathing. Ralph has a vantage point staked out and enjoys a bit of peeping at Diane through his binoculars.


Sadly for Ralph, his perving is interrupted when is brother Lou and friend Sean show up for some peeping of their own - they should have set up a turnstile! Ralph isn’t happy and charges the late coming perverts and Lou falls to his death. Sean runs off but is later warned by Ralph to say nothing to the cops. 


Sean has recently left school and is on friendly terms with Diane who is all alone now that her racing driver husband has left the scene. She has designs on young Sean and invites him over to help her ‘clean out her garage’ - that’s a new euphemism on me. After a quick start Diane and Sean start to see each other, much to the outrage of the locals , although his Mom is pretty cool about it all. Ralph isn’t though, and stalks the couple with his menacing bayonet in hand.


Things inevitably come to a head with Sean kidnapped by Ralph, with Diane in hot pursuit - who will survive and is there enough time for her to get her top off again?


This was a dreadfully poor and cheap looking exploitation flick, but it wasn’t without it’s charms. I liked Anthony James, whom we know from ‘W’ Classics ‘World Gone Wild’ and ‘Wacko’ as the crazed stalker Ralph. He had a weird coffin full of stuff including a Chekov’s gun to go with his hearse and he was ‘weirdo’ personified. There was a funny scene where he went into his coffin of tricks and next minute he’s in a frogman suit eyeing our couple having sex on their boat.


Angel Tomkins was decent in the main role as the sex mad and poor judgement burdened Diane, who had a succession of bikini tops that she just had to keep shedding. ‘Dennis the Menace’ Jay North was less good and his floundering was annoying.


Down the cast, the players looked like they were working for beer with Sean’s Dad especially bad. The film ran a long 100 minutes with a lot of padding generously provided. Frolicking in the swimming pool is fine but five minutes of it didn’t advance the plot an inch! There were scenes where awkward silences were interrupted by non-sequitors and it looked improvised to no real effect, apart from adding to the amateur vibe.


The nihilistic ending seemed unnecessary but I guess that’s the genre - blood and boobs with no learnings to be had!


THE Tag Line : You’ll Learn Nothing!  61%

 

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