Everything That Has Aged Badly in 10 Raunchy Teen Comedies from the '80s

aging badly

The 1980s teen comedy has great nostalgic value for many members of Generation X. After all, they themselves were teenagers when these films came out, and for many of them, the films seemed to understand what 'they thought and felt.

Unfortunately, over the last 40 years, some jokes will no longer be as successful as before. Some of them are even difficult to call “jokes,” especially when they are at the expense of marginalized groups. Here's our list of teen comedies from the 1980s that may have amused some at the time but are deeply problematic today.

1. “Strange Science”

1985
“Weird Science” tells the story of two bullied high school nerds. They are so unable to find girls who would even make eye contact with them that they resort to the only plan they have left: they use a computer to design their own perfect woman, who emerges from a cloud of dry ice beneath the form of Kelly LeBrock. . The mere idea that one could create a perfect woman was already not so hot when the film came out, but “Weird Science” also contains a very unfortunate moment in which Anthony's character Michael Hall treats a party boy in his home of insult. denigrate homosexuals. Unfortunately, this insult appears quite often in many of these films.

2. “Sixteen Candles”

1984
“Sixteen Candles” made Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall stars overnight and also made director John Hughes the hottest commodity. Although this film is on many lists of the most beloved films of the 80s, it is a whole different experience to watch it in 2024. Every time the Asian exchange student, “Long Duk Dong”, appears in the On screen, he does it to the sound of a gong, and Anthony's nerd character Michael Hall has non-consensual sex with a girl who's passed out, and it's played for laughs. It doesn't help that this happens off-screen.

3. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”

1986
“Ferris Bueller's Day Off” is a silly, if rather good-natured, movie centered on a high school student faking an illness so he doesn't have to go to school that day. The reason it has aged poorly is not so much the storyline or dialogue as the fact that it stars Jeffrey Jones as the school principal. This prolific actor, whose credits include “Beetlejuice” and “Amadeus,” had to register as a sex offender in 2003 when he was accused of taking lewd photos of an underage boy. If you know, it's hard to watch this movie.

4. “The Breakfast Club”

1985
“The Breakfast Club” depicted five high school students in detention all day Saturday for various offenses. It has aged poorly for several reasons, but don't take our word for it. No less an authority than Molly Ringwald herself, who starred in the film, said many years later that she had a lot of problems with her character as a spoiled rich girl who found herself in a romantic relationship with the Judd Nelson's juvenile delinquent character, as he spends most of the time. of the film subjecting her to verbal abuse, most of it sexual. But the real the crime is the makeover her character gave to Ally Sheedy's goth character!

5. “Say anything…”

1989
“Say Anything…” is the story of a teenage loser (John Cusack) who has just graduated from high school and is infatuated with his class valedictorian, played by Ione Skye. The only truly problematic part comes in a key scene in the film in which Cusack shows up outside Skye's house at dawn with a boombox and blasts Peter Gabriel's “In Your Eyes” out of her open window. It's supposed to be a show of love and devotion, but today we call it “harassment.”

6. “Porky”

nineteen eighty one
We'll say this about “Porky's”: it's not trying to be something it's not. It’s a crude, crass, misogynistic exercise, and I’m proud of it! It has everything from shower watching to fat and slut shaming, and to be honest, it was very problematic from the very day it came out. It made a lot of money anyway, probably thanks to teenagers in trench coats and fake mustaches pretending to be adults, and led to two sequels, 1983's “Porky's II: The Next Day.” and 1985's “Porky's Revenge”, both of which were released. also made a lot of money. Well, the universe doesn't always reward virtue.

7. “The Last American Virgin”

1982
The only thing that sets “The Last American Virgin” apart from all the other teen comedies released in the 1980s is that the ending is a bit sad. Otherwise, this is a pretty standard teenage romp, and his attitude toward the human need to experience physical affection is depicted in the crudest way possible. Like “Porky's,” it also indulges in fat and slut-shaming, but gets very depressing during a sequence in which our heroic main character and his buddies hire a prostitute to deflower them, and they end up getting crabs from her.

8. “Zapped!” »

1982
“Zapped!” ” was a 1982 comedy starring Scott Baio and Willie Aames, and for that reason alone, you could probably say that it has aged poorly. Baio plays a high school student who develops telekinetic powers through a process so tortuous we're not even going to bother explaining it to you, and he then spends most of the film using those powers to magically undress his fellow students. class. A review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said it was hard to imagine that the film's writers “are even old enough to hold a pen.” If you've ever wondered what the 1976 movie “Carrie” would look like if it ate lead paint chips daily for a year, look no further.

9. “Private lessons”

nineteen eighty one
In the 1980s, people were built differently. Indeed, they did not consider the story of a teenager being educated in the ways of love by an adult to be a violation of the law. Instead, as in 1981's “Private Lessons,” the situation was seen as rife with comedic possibilities. So that's the premise of the film, which starred European softcore star Sylvia Kristel as the woman who teaches the ways of love to a 15-year-old. -a one-year-old boy. He is depicted in the poster as having to stand on a pile of books to kiss her because he is still a child and has not fully grown up yet. Get it?

10. “The man of the soul”

1986
We're taking a break from 1980s films with alarmingly tone-deaf sexual elements to focus on a film that's utterly repugnant for entirely different reasons. “Soul Man” stars C. Thomas Howell as a white student who wants to go to Harvard, but is denied a studentship, so he takes tanning pills and pretends to be black. He spends the majority of the film in blackface, and the black characters in the film are unable to tell that he is white. The film makes some weak attempts at seriousness to say yes, racism exists, but after 104 minutes of watching a dude in blackface, it's hard to believe it was particularly sincere.

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