In many Hollywood films, desperate parents try to deal with their rebellious and misbehaving teenage sons by having them sent to military academy, where harsh discipline is supposed to achieve what their parenting skills could not. The plot of Up the Academy, a 1980 comedy directed by Robert Downey Senior, explores what happens when these misbehaving boys continue their antics at the academy. Four powerful men have serious problems with their sons. Eisenhower “Ike” MacArthur (played by Wendell Brown) seduced his stepmother, the wife of a black televangelist preacher. El-Hashid “Hash” Amier Jr (played by Tom Citera), son of a rich Arab sheikh, is a kleptomaniac. Oliver Holt (played by Hutch Parker) made his girlfriend Barbara (played by Stacy Nelkin) pregnant, jeopardising the election campaign of his father, a conservative Michigan politician who preaches family values. Chooch Bambalazi (played by Ralph Macchio) simply disrespects his father, a mob boss. All four boys are sent to Sheldon R. Weinberg Military Academy, where they befriend each other and try to spend as much time as possible drinking, smoking weed, and chasing girls. However, they also have to deal with the tyrannical Major Liceman (played by Ron Leibman), who stops at nothing to establish his authority.
The film was originally conceived by the publishers of Mad, a satirical magazine that had been quite popular and influential in 1970s America; its mascot, Alfred E. Neumann, appears in the opening and end credits. The idea, obviously spurred by the success of Animal House, a film associated with rival National Lampoon magazine, was to create its own film series based on the magazine’s anarchic and irreverent style of humour. What appeared on screen turned out to be an almost complete failure. The quality of the humour, mostly based around ethnic stereotypes, various bodily functions, and sex, is abysmal, while some of the jokes, like those dealing with abortion or teachers sexually abusing students, might be genuinely disturbing to more sensitive viewers. To make things worse, almost all the characters in the film are dislikeable or played by unremarkable actors (with Macchio being the only one of the youngsters who would have something of an acting career). Inept direction by former 1960s counterculture filmmaker Downey Senior (whose son and future star Robert Junior very briefly appears in one scene) makes matters even worse, and the constant, jukebox-like use of New Wave songs instead of a conventional soundtrack becomes very irritating for viewers without sentimental links to that period of rock music history. The only elements that make this film somewhat watchable are Barbara Bach as a weapons instructor who teaches her class dressed in revealing clothes, and Ron Leibman’s very strong performance as an over-the-top authoritarian villain. Leibman, despite being the best thing about the whole film, was so displeased with it that he demanded his name be removed from the credits. Mad magazine also publicly disassociated itself from the project—a decision that, in light of what we see in Up the Academy, is quite understandable.
RATING: 3/10 (+)
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