Bubba basically could have been arrested several times in this movie for Breaking and Entering, Attempted Sexual Assault on the Gym teacher, Being a Peeping Tom, and Talking photographs while peeping. His girlfriend also states that he had sex her with while she passed out.
shareHe also lures a girl to his room with the intention of doing all kinds and the way he goes about it should be illegal. I know it's played for laughs and it's what passed for comedy in the 80s.
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crockett,
Yeah, it's pretty shocking in retrospect that sexual criminal offenses passed as comedy in the late 70's early-mid 80's. There was this whole rape comedy theme to a lot of of those teen-age sex films. It's like these guys came up with all these tricks in order to have sex with these women. It's usually some fat guy or an ugly nerdy looking guy who devises some illegal scheme to have sex with these women. Whether their behavior was legal or not is never really dealt with.
Even stuff like voyeuristic peeping Tom behavior with cameras is no big deal. Photographing women naked without their consent is a felony offense. The guy that was videotaping Erin Andrews was arrested and sent to prison for 3 years.
I think most of these films were just trying to copy cat "Animal House".
Yeah, it's funny to look back on it. I remember watching "I Spit on Your Grave" with a friend of mine and his older sister was talking about how disgusting we were for watching it, but at least that movie portrays the victim as the protagonist, unlike these movies where the victims are portrayed as sometimes deserving what they get or no empathy for their plight.
We were watching "Uncle Buck" the other day and it's funny how movies like that have the protagonist saying and doing all kinds of illegal things, like kidnapping, assault, and making threats of violence. My friend and I disagreed on one point. There's a female character who is 16. Her boyfriend is presumably the same age. He says something like, "Let's go to my car," and all of a sudden she starts treating him like he did something wrong. My opinion was that she has the right to refuse, but at the same time, she was already making out with him and seemed to be enjoying it, so she didn't have to treat him like a jerk. She could have just said, "I don't want to do anything like that right now," or any other thing, but she goes straight to treating him like a jerk.
Anyway, 80s movies are a special breed. I remember really liking movies like "Young Warriors" and "Hotdog," too.
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crocket,
Yeah, you're right in a sense that in these types of films it's almost as if it's justified to comit these criminal acts against these girls because they're the head cheerleader or the home coming queen, or the rich girl or the really pretty girl.
Those teenage sex comedies of the late 70's-early 80's were an odd result of a few things. There were relaxed censorship laws in the 70's so nudity & sexuality became more prevalent in films. Raunchy screwball comedy became popular by the end of the decade and I guess no one really cared that most of the behavior was illegal. Animal House was a huge hit in '78 so there were a lot of copy cat films with similar themes. HBO/Cinemax was relatively new so they needed cheap programing to fill their late night schedules.
It's odd that in the early-mid 70's most of the films with nudity & sexuality were mostly serious or at least melodramas. What's ironic is that the sex "comedies" were actually depicting illegal behavior and were far raunchier than the dramas with nudity & sexuality.
I think the most disturbing thing in retrospect is how casually they treat rape or sexual assault in these films. The films usually justify this behavior because the victim is usually a cheerleader or a rich & popular girl. There's also a somewhat recurring trope in these films called, "Rape is Love". What happens is the geek or the fat guy comes up with some trick or scheme to rape the head cheerleader or the prom queen etc. and then the girl isn't traumatized but actually falls in love with the geek/fat guy/ugly guy/unpopular guy (The Revenge of the Nerds, Sixteen Candles) are two examples.
I think things changed drastically by the mid-late 80's because by that time VCR's were very prevalent so young men could just go rent pornography and not have to bother with all the screwball comedy stuff. Then the sexual mores changed pretty drastically by the mid 80's because of the aids epidemic and the rise of conservative social behavior.
I think "Uncle Buck" is in a different category then these early 80's screwball movies because it was released around 1989 and the themes are different. The craziest thing to me when I watch "Uncle Buck" now is that John Candy is about 39 years old in that film and he'd be dead in 5 years. And then you're just basically watching him kill himself on screen with his eating and his smoking and his drinking and everybody is having a good laugh at his expense.