Director: John Robins           
Cast: Tom Parsekian, Michael Berz, Bronson Pinchot

The two funniest bits of Hot Resort are at the beginning of the movie. On the island of St. Kits, a group of young men from New York, who have been hired to work at the Royal St. Kits' Hotel, have just landed at the island's airport. The first man approaches the black passport inspector. The inspector asks him if he has a visa. "Visa?" answers the first man. "I don't have a Visa. I have a Master Charge..." Then the second man approaches the passport inspector and says, "Are you the 'Uncola Guy'? Haw Haw Haw!"

So begins Hot Resort. Now, I had high hopes for this comedy. After all, it was produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of Cannon Pictures, and I've previously said that any movie produced by these guys is fun to watch on some level. Plus, this movie was co-written by Boaz Davidson, the writer/director of Private Popsicle, a movie that was so dumb, it was charming. However, this movie is just plain dumb, with extreme technical ineptness. I think I'll have to change my rule about Golan/Globus flicks to something like, "All Golan/Globus movies are fun to watch, except for Hot Resort."

In Private Popsicle, and the other entries of the "Lemon Popsicle" series, Boaz centered around three characters: a fat bumbler, a slick ladies-man, and a shy, "sensitive" guy. Here, the screenplay is more ambitious; it's centered around four guys. There is a fat bumbler and a slick ladies-man here, but the other two characters are a bespecled nerd ("My computer has 64K of RAM!") and a wisecracker. These characters are driven by instinct, not personality. All they are obsessed with doing during the movie is getting laid. So there are numerous vignettes centering around the characters attempts at this, usually cutting back and fourth from one vignette to another playing at the same time. It's so jumbled up that it becomes incomprehensible, in addition to the fact that any story thrust gets stopped when the view is changed to another story. Even if each vignette was played in its entirety non-stop, the stories would still suffer from shoddy editing that makes many of the vignettes not appear to have any kind of ending. Plus, we would still see the technical goofs like ground microphones sticking out so far in the frame that the characters almost trip on them.

Frank Gorshin (credited as "Special guest appearance MR. FRANK GORSHIN") wanders in and out of the movie as a TV game show winner, adding nothing to the story - if you can call it a story. Oh, I guess there's something like a plot forming in the second half of the movie. A snotty rowing team, at the hotel to film a soup commercial, builds up rivalries both romantically and class-wise between them and the hotel staff. When the commercial is changed so that the rowing team must race another team, guess who is hired to play the other team? And guess who wins at the end? Though the winning team is ecstatic over their victory, the only reason they won the race is by default, making their victory hollow. By then, their lives are clearly shown to be so pathetic, I guess that's why they celebrate so much.

Another thing about the second half of the movie - it breaks one of the serious rules of movie comedy by somehow managing to forget to try and be funny. Minutes go by without any attempts at humor, sophomoric or not. It should have been clear to the three screenwriters at this point that they were working with pretty thin material. But Golan/Globus bought anything in the 80s, so why should they have bothered to make any changes?

Before Leonard Maltin started to shorten his movie reviews in his Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide, the review for Hot Resort used to say something like, "Pinchot later bad-mouthed this movie when his career picked up." Okay, Pinchot, I can understand why you had bad things to say about this movie. But please tell us what you were thinking when you agreed to sign up for this movie.