Director: William Sachs                      
Cast: Charles Schillaci, Allan Kayser, Louisa Moritz

Okay; first, don't look at the title of the movie being reviewed. We're going to play, "Guess The Movie". You haven't looked at the title? Good, let's play the game now. Here's a scene from the movie: A group of horny teenagers, lured by the promise of sex, go to a woman with a thick accent. She dances around them, and they are made to decide which one of them will have sex with her then. The fat teenager goes into the bedroom with the woman and his friends hunch outside the door's keyhole, laughing at seeing their fat friend getting it on. The woman's significant other enters, and the fat teenager decides then to step out, resulting in the fat teenager clad in his vest and underwear being chased by the significant other. You're probably thinking this movie is The Last American Virgin, right? Well, you're wrong, even if this movie also has Louisa Moritz, and Joe Rubbo playing another fat bumbler.

Here are some more hints about the movie: It was produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus' Cannon film company in 1985. The story concerns four horny teenagers (a nerd, a fat guy, a slick ladies' man, and a "normal" guy) who go down south to work at a resort hotel, which is run by a screaming, thoroughly unlikable guy who turns out to be gay at the end of the movie. The four teenagers then get into various sexual vignettes, all happening at the same time and sloppily edited together. And the movie title has the word "Hot" in it. So now your guess is Hot Resort, then? You're wrong again. The movie is Hot Chili, a Cannon movie that rips off other Cannon movies, not just The Last American Virgin. A scene where a pursued teen dresses in drag, performs on stage, and his pursuer falling in love with this new "girl" was earlier done in Private Popsicle. The end credits list the use of music from Golan & Globus' Breakin' and Rappin'. And speaking of music, one part of the movie uses (without credit) music from the Luis Bacalov-scored Quien Sabe? (a.k.a. A Bullet For The General).

So the movie is 99 44/100% rip-off. But a rip-off can be entertaining and have some life to it after the transfusion. But this movie is 100% abysmal - it makes Hot Resort look like an actual movie. Hot Chili is wretchedly photographed, poorly acted, badly directed, dimly lit, and written by hacks. There is absolutely no reason to watch this movie, even if you were associated with the production in one manner or the other. And if you were, you should be ashamed of yourself. On second thought, maybe those people should watch this movie - twice. It would be (barely) adequate punishment for their contributions in creating this turd.

A plot synopsis is impossible for this movie; all it is is a collection of vignettes, mostly centered around the four "protagonists" getting into various hijinks with the hotel staff or the guests. That's it. Serious. Hot Resort, bad as it was, at least had a story in its second half about training and then competing against a group of snots in a boat race. Here, we are expected to find entertainment value in vignettes like the woman in an elderly honeymooning couple asking about the gift shop, "Do they have a diaphragm? I left mine at home." Or the nerd spending most of the first third of the movie walking around with a pissed-off guest and her suitcases trying to find her room. Director Sachs thought that by speeding up the film and the sound during parts of this segment, it would be even funnier. Or dubbing cartoon BOINGS! and THUDS! here and elsewhere in the movie. Is Sachs a frustrated live-action director who secretly wanted to be in animation?

As for the direction...what direction? In many scenes, the "action" seems to have been photographed with a thick layer of Vaseline on the lens. You never get a good feel of the hotel or the surrounding area; though the location is supposedly in Mexico, pretty much all of it could have been shot in California. Editing is so bad, Sachs tries to makes sense of everything with the narration of one of the characters as he writes home, though it comes across as an editing rescue maneuver because almost nothing happens onscreen before or afterwards. It's more evident when one of the four teenagers disappears offscreen for some time, and a really lame excuse for the disappearance is narrated. And speaking of the four teenagers, not one of them can act or project any likeability. The nerd whimpers "I wanna f**k! I just wanna f**k!" so many times, I wanted to strangle him. I was actually happy to see them encounter terrible luck like having to room with a donkey (har har) or someone chasing after them with a gun, though activities like the latter gave the sour soundtrack an excuse to play absolutely rotten songs (except for Bacalov's song). However, if you want to hear David Powell's "Body Shop" again, by all means rent this movie; you'll even get to hear it more than once.

I don't want to write anything else about Hot Chili. If you want to know more about it, read my review of Hot Resort, but take away any mention of plot or bad-but-not-completely-terrible production values.