The Teacher (1974)

The Worst Film Ever

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

The misleading ad campaign utilized during this movie's grind-house run to lure in that fanbase, which exclaims, "She Corrupted The Youthful Morality Of An Entire School!", unabashedly suggests a film far different than what actually unfolds here. The Teacher is most assuredly not a raunchy romp about a nymphomaniac administrator who beds a slew of lucky high school lads, and in fact the bulk of the film is devoted to a Mrs. Robinson-esque tale about an abnormally saccharine love connection between an attractive high school instructor named Diane and an awkward, freshly graduated young man named Sean.Since the titular educator is brought to life by the lovely Angel Tompkins, it's definitely not hard to buy in to the budding affair between Diane and Sean. Infinitely difficult to swallow, however, is how much time Sean spends resisting advances that 99.99% percent of the 18 year-old boys in the world would willingly and enthusiastically submit to immediately. When Sean finally succumbs to Diane's none-too-subtle wiles, his technique is astounding, and he somehow manages to have sex with her without removing, or even unzipping, his trousers.Diane and Sean's canoodling is hampered by the presence of an ardent admirer named Ralph who follows Diane around like a deranged, lovesick puppy, and shows his ardor by peering into her windows and spying on her with binoculars. The stalker's devotion is so all-encompassing that it isn't even limited to the land, and when Diane and Sean take a ride on her boat to pursue some high seas nookie, our diligent lurker dutifully dons a full frogman suit and snorkel gear to swim out and peep into the windows of her vessel.Matters are complicated further because Diane's swimfan is actually the older brother of Sean's best friend, who dies in an accident which the skewed creeper blames Sean for. George's obsession with Diane merges with his mission to punish Sean for his perceived transgression, and his peeping eventually evolves into menacing the couple with a knife.Aside from a generous allotment of nudity from Tompkins, nothing in the film veers anywhere near the exploitation elements enthusiasts will rightfully be expecting from a purported "grind-house" movie. Even the sexual component is decidedly un-kinky, and since the film features lighthearted scenes of Diane and Sean sharing intimate dinners, frolicking in the pool, and confessing their eternal love to one another, the allegedly "torrid" affair is actually a pretty sweet display of courting. The downer finale diffuses this impression a bit, but since the film up to that point is so innocuous, the climax seems to belong to another movie entirely.This isn't to say that The Teacher isn't a fairly enjoyable effort. Despite often-atrocious dialogue, stilted acting, and the relentlessly silly handling of the evil George subplot, it's easy to get wrapped up in the romance and root Diane and Sean on as they pursue their forbidden love. There's a fair share of both intentional and accidental humor, the former providing a few quirkily amusing scenes, the latter providing diversions for fans of inept film-making. Plus, if you enjoy '70s supermarket music, you'll find a veritable treasure trove on the score here.However, this whole thing is far too harmless to warrant inclusion on the grind-house circuit, and I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the theaters where this film was paired with some of the more infamous offerings of the era. I can only imagine the stupefied faces of audiences expecting the deviancy promised on the poster, when this is what they got instead.Unless you're enthralled by the prospect of seeing Angel Tompkins repeatedly bare her breasts (granted, this isn't entirely unpleasant), you probably don't need a lesson from The Teacher. But for what it's worth, I'm not sorry I sat through this, and considering how often I've spent my evening slogging through a piece of artless trash and wondered, "why the hell did I watch that, and when I'm on my death bed, will I wish I had that time back?", I'd consider this offering a comparatively decent exercise.

Now if you just want to see some really nice shots of Angel Tompkins's bosoms than The Teacher is definitely your kind of film. It's barely half a step above soft core porn when she and Jay North get down to the deed.I'm sure Jay North was seeing this as some kind of comeback film for him after Dennis The Menace and Maya where he could finally establish himself as an adult star. And what better way than to finally have some screen sex with an older woman.But the acting in this film was some of the worst ever put on celluloid and the photography looked like it was shot with my father's old Bell&Howell movie camera.Angel's is a 28 year old high school teacher on her summer vacation with the rest of her peers and she's also a neighbor of one of her recently graduated students, Jay North. Her husband has up and left her both miserable and horny. She lights on North and the two of them go at it hot and heavy.Not that North hasn't noticed here, but so has creepy Anthony James. He spies on her occasionally from his crib in an abandoned warehouse. One day North and friend Rudy Herrera who is James's younger brother go up to the crib to take a gander for themselves and James spots them, while fleeing Herrera falls off a catwalk and James in his twisted sociopathic logic holds North responsible. Both for the death of his brother and the fact he has taken up with the object of his voyeurism.Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster wrote a truly insipid song for this film and it saddens me that two Oscar winning songwriters got reduced to this in order to find work in Hollywood.It all ends badly for the protagonists as Angel the cougar learns the error of her ways.For fans of Angel Tompkins's bosoms only.

This film opens with a truly awful, ear-grinding, song; probably called 'Every Boy Needs a Teacher', but thankfully it doesn't completely give an early warning sign of what's to come. While both the film and the song are very low rent and lacking in quality; there is actually a solid story lurking somewhere behind the crappy script and ridiculous acting; and that makes The Teacher a very enjoyable slice of drive-in cheese. The story is rather tame by today's standards; and given some of the films I've seen from the early seventies; it's pretty tame for 1974 too. The plot focuses on an eighteen year old lad named Sean. Sean and his friend Lou go to the top of an old warehouse to borrow Lou's crazy brother's binoculars in order to spy on Diane; their teacher, sunbathing topless. However, tragedy strikes when the brother catches the pair; and Lou ends up tumbling to his death. The summer improves, however, when Diane; who happens to be a friend of Sean's mother, begins to take an interest in the lad. Meanwhile, Lou's crazy brother is still on Sean's tail.First thing's first, the acting in this movie is some of the worst I've ever seen (and I'm no stranger to movies with ridiculously bad acting!). The two leads, Angel Tompkins and Jay North, are at least good looking pair, but they absolutely can't act (nor can anyone else in this film). The script is not much better and leads the bad actors into delivering silly and mistimed dialogue, which brings the film down further. However, the base plot is a rather good one - it's simply an older woman seducing a young man, but it's very sexy; and if anything the sexiness is increased by the lack of talented scriptwriting since we waste no time in getting straight into the main point. The sub-plot involving the crazy brother stalking the pair doesn't get in the way as much as it might have done; I preferred the parts dealing with the central relationship between the lead characters, but the two go together well. It all boils down to a real downer of an ending, however. I don't mind a sad ending; but when a film is as bright and happy as this one (to illustrate the point, the death towards the start of the film is barely given a moment's notice by any character in the film), I wasn't expecting it to end like that!

One of the handful of pictures made by Hikmet Avedis, a classifiable low-budget director of not-quite schlock and drive-in flicks, The Teacher is ostensibly about a 28 year old teacher (lovely Angel Tompkins)- the hottie of the town without a husband as he's a drifter/biker somewheres- who bonds with the shy 18 year old former student neighbor (1/2 dimensional Jay North) and start up a passionate affair. This part of the story is basically more or less just a Penthouse letter extended to feature length (and, oddly enough for a drive-in flick, the amount of sex is actually shown to a minimum, above the belt as it were). What makes it just a little bit more interesting, if also insane, is the character Ralph (crazy-eyed Anthony James), who comes off like a 2nd string James Bond villain missing a couple of acting classes.He's weird and a snoop, with an obsession with Diane holding a torch for her unofficially while also trying to hunt down Sean after the death of his younger brother. It seems stranger still why Ralph would be so distraught over his brother's death when all Ralph seems to do is sit in his warehouse by the harbor, take out a pair of binoculars from his coffin (which comes out of the mysterious hearse he drives around) which also has a rifle. But he's a villain nonetheless, creeping up at pretty much any instance Sean and Diane are out, or even while they're on her boat making love as he creeps up like a Z-grade Aquaman.If nothing else his ridiculous performance of an even sillier, deranged cat makes it watchable, when all else is just kind of mundane romance (North especially can barely act his way out of a paper bag, at least Tompkins has her sex appeal). It's nothing very special, or memorable, but if the title ever came up in conversation it would be fun to wax poetic about Anthony James as Ralph, or to contemplate the ways it could make a decent self-made MST3K feature.