Pinball Summer (1981)

The original title "Pinball Summer" is more thematic, but there is a fair amount of picking up/pulling/scoring and mostly just making out in this juvenile offering. Generally, films with this type of cast fall into one of two categories: horror in particular slasher films in which even the gorgeous girls get killed, and half-baked scatological escapades in which testosterone-filled teens and young men chase girls who are often more than willing to get caught. There is usually a virgin of course, as well as a nerd and an alpha male/bully. Other characters include exasperated older people, and occasionally cops who are out to spoil the fun.All those elements are present here, but the film doesn't succeed. The plot, such as it is, is about a pinball competition with a long run-up into it. On the plus side, nobody gets killed, and as the bad guys are more idiots than thugs, there are no villains with a capital V either, so no real triumph, certainly not over evil. There is a soundtrack, but even that is half-hearted. Watch a slasher flick next time.

When I first took this tape out of my surprise retro-box, full of yet-to-watch 70s and 80s movies, I was looking for a fun moral-less comedy.What I found is a mildly amusing comedy, yet one also fully draped in a dubious moral message.In short, "Pinball Summer" tells the story of four teens - two guys and two girls - looking to have some summer fun after their last day of school. Sounds cool? Sadly, the main characters are hot-headed, egoistical and spoilt children, who will attack (verbally and sometimes physically) anything and everything to get their fun : biker gangs, rich people, old ladies, fat people, policemen and firemen, disco dancers, etc.As long as you can prove you look average and wear standard clothes and 80s hair, you have the right to make fun of everyone else, and no one can get back at you without incurring your rightful wrath.Property destruction is also of their domain. Throwing things on the road, stealing, ruining and drowning vehicles, damaging properties : no one will ever get back at "the normals" for the 100,000$ loss they caused.Making "normality" crush everything else is not fun, and it felt like being shoved in the following message : be like us or die with our laughing ringing in your ears.These "Pinball Summer" people would have been "villains" in many other films.An OK addition for any 80s comedy collectors. Otherwise, stay away from this ideological drivel.

Quite clearly filmed under the title, PINBALL SUMMER, PICKUP is a truly bizarre Canadian version of USA teen flicks. The film tries to pass off Canada as the USA, but that is hardly the largest of its credibility problems. This is one of those films where you are led to believe that a group of teens is going to spend all summer chasing down a trophy for a pinball tournament as the be all and end all of existence! Even supposedly rough and tumble biker gangs go gaga for the hunk of metal and faux wood. But, between the hackneyed boyfriend-girlfriend storyline, the loser virgin clichés and the chase for the elusive trophy, PICKUP SUMMER gains momentum to become a truly indescribable bit of 80's nostalgia. Leering shots at the pretty leads are expected and break up the monotony, but when the film has over-the-top homo-erotic biker dudes chasing after not only the girls, but this trophy and, seemingly, each other, it truly goes off the rails - in it's own "good-bad" way. The theme song "Pinball Summer" (they even did a custom Pinball Summer video game) is genuinely catchy in a pop 80's kind of way, and there is a quirky energy to the second half of the film. Grindhouse fest

This movie is a golden feast bursting with the delicious flavours of a grade A hamburger cooked to perfection and shoved into an exhaust pipe during some well executed tomfoolery. Few directors have burst on the scene with as much promise as a young George Mihalka in 1979, truly a time which we all remember as the Pinball Summer. With the ballsy grit of a Canadian Martin Scorcese who was half circus clown and half inbred madman, Mihalka was the name on the tip of many film industry tongues that year. This homo-erotic masterpiece - scored to perfection by songwriting team Jay Boivin & Germaine Gauthier A.K.A. The Rock'n'Roll Genius Twin Set - had people expecting great things from the young maverick. Stars Michael Zelniker and Tom Kovacs became overnight sensation heartthrob superstars in the gay sections of Montreal ghettos. The plot, following the exploits of two fun loving idiots who constantly screw over other people for no reason, was of immeasurable influence to some of the biggest comedy hits of the next decade. Films such as Police Academy and Snowboard Academy took the patented Pinball Summer formula of mixing a wacky, mischievous protagonist with the occasional naked boobies and added their own elements like 'funny black guy' or 'short nerd who is also dumb' or in some cases 'poop snowman.'This influence can not be accurately gauged by the film's commercial success, as it failed to ignite at the box office during a year which the a short lived 'Pinball Craze of 79/80' was sucking the disposable income from an estimated 90% of America's illiterate youth. (The original tagline of "Pinball Was their Vietnam" didn't seem to help much either) Fortunately, several discarded prints of the film found their way into the right hands and began making the rounds at some of Hollywood's most lavish coke parties. Before long Pinball Summer was not only the hippest movie to feature at coke parties across America, it became an in-joke which served as a passkey into the cocaine culture that ruled the 80's. Those who didn't know the right references from Pinball Summer simply weren't allowed access to the back rooms of the presidential suites or anywhere on Roberts Evans' property, and in some cases were badly beaten out of paranoid suspicion.While most of the cast shunned the poison apple of Hollywood and went back to working as happy garbagemen in various townships across Quebec, a hungry George Mihalka kept at it. And while his career never reached the heights that his mother had predicted after such an astonishing debut, there are many critics who feel that 14 projects and 16 years later Mihalka finally bested himself with the straight to video favorite 'Deceptions 2: Edge of Deception.' D2 transplanted many of the dominant themes of his early work into the thriving genre of the erotic thriller, and opened the doors for the radical visionary to bring the his message to a new generation with a new set of problems. In 1995 D2 was unleashed on VHS to a world far more complex and less fun loving than that of 1979. A world where Pinball is sadly no longer the answer. Thank God naked boobies can still make a difference.