Losin' It (1982)

Losin' ItGiving away your virginity in some sex-pact is ludicrous - especially since you can sell it on the Internet.Unfortunately, the digital era is decades away in this 1960s set teen sex-comedy.Hell-bent on popping their cherries, three seniors, Woody (Tom Cruise), Dave (Jackie Earle Haley) and Spider (John Stockwell), head from L.A. to Tijuana in a 1957 Chevy intent on losing their virginity in a Mexican brothel. However, losing it is harder than it seems as the boys are tested at every turn by the corrupt local sheriff, a desperate housewife (Shelley Long) and a bad case of limp dick.Teeming with tons of testosterone-tinged hijinks involving cross-border prostitutes, fireworks and fabled aphrodisiacs this 1983 romp is a forgotten gem of the juvenile genre that features an exceptionally embarrassing performance from a young Tom Cruise. Moreover, for a man to lose his virginity, technically, he needs to be penetrated. Yellow Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

It's 1965 Los Angeles. Woody (Tom Cruise), angry Dave (Jackie Earle Haley) and cool Spider (John Stockwell) are high school student vowing to lose it in their trip to Tijuana, Mexico. They need money and wheeling dealing little Wendell forces his way into the group. Kathy (Shelley Long) runs away and grabs a ride with the guys. She gets a quickie divorce in Tijuana.This is following the success of Porky's over a year before. The difference is that this isn't nearly as funny. The story isn't very original and has all the hallmarks of a teen sex romp. The boys aren't very likable. They're missing the lovable goof character. Neither Dave nor Wendell is lovable. The movie just has too much anger. Everybody is angry. The group is separated for much of the movie anyways. It does have an awkward kissing scene between Cruise and Long. That may be worth a look.

I saw this movie in an entirely appropriate place -- as part of an all-night quadruple feature at a cinema in Northern Ontario, which could have been more accurately described as "Four lousy films for the price of one"! (For the record, the other three films were "Ghoulies", "Missing in Action" and "Ninja III - The Domination").I would say that Losin' It is probably the best of these four films – not that that's really saying very much. (It was the concluding feature of a very long night of cinematic mediocrity) . It's not an awful film (particularly compared with some of the other components of this multiple feature), and it has the advantage of having been put together by a crew who knew what they were doing. Rather, it's an assembly line teen film of the period, which is given somewhat more polish than usual by the presence of Shelley Long and the up-and-coming Tom Cruise in the cast.Two years previously in 1981, Porky's established a profitable template for teen films that many producers are still exploiting today. I see Losin' It as a Porky's knock-off, from a similar time and aimed at a similar audience. Essentially, if you were part of that target audience, you would probably have enjoyed it. I was just passing out of the target demographic when I saw this, so perhaps I'm more blasé about it than I might have been if I had seen it a few years earlier. There's a whole genre of teen sex comedy (which tries to tease the audience while dancing around the fact that they can't really show very much) that loses a lot of its impact once you've actually "lost it" yourself.

I thought that this movie was very funny the first time I saw it ten years ago, and I still do today. This is a movie that is in the same genre as Porky's or Revenge of the Nerds. True fact, Tom Cruise said in a Playboy interview that he did this movie because of Jackie Earle Haley. Since Haley had been in Breaking Away, Cruise figured that this movie would be just as good. It didn't quite work out the way he expected, at least not right away. Cruise fan or not, it's worth a look. For me, Jackie pretty much steals every scene he's in. Anytime I watch this movie, I have to laugh at Tom Cruise because he ended up becoming one of the biggest stars in the movie world, and he started out in this. If you REALLY want to see Cruise in another light, check out Endless Love, with Brooke Shields. It's his first movie, and though he's in it for less than a minute, it's worth a look, just like Losin' It. Check it out!