Friday, March 24, 2023

Podcast: Zapped! (1982)

Your Stupid Minds covers 1982’s Zapped!, a post-Porky’s teen sex comedy where a teenage boy acquires telekinetic powers and uses them mostly to pop girls’ shirts open.

Barney (Scott Baio) is a typical high school nerd (he wears glasses, you see), with free rein over his own science laboratory in the school, dosing mice with whiskey to see if they swim better while drunk. Somehow this results in the titular zapping, and he gains the ability to move objects with his mind. At first his hormones mostly control the power, as numerous ladies’ tops are flung open, but soon enough his awful friend Peyton (Willie Aames) convinces him to use his powers beyond just sexual humiliation. Soon enough Barney is cheating at baseball, cheating at roulette, terrorizing a model plane enthusiast at the park for no reason, you get the idea.

There are numerous other side plots to get this thing well beyond feature length, including a drinking contest at Magic Mountain, a dream sequence involving Scatman Crothers, Albert Einstein, and cartoon salami, a Star Trek parody, and a sexual romp between Principal Coolidge (Robert Mandan) and teacher Ms. Burnhart (Sue Ane Langdon).

Barney starts to feel wary about the use of his powers, but not enough to stop him from enacting an inevitable Carrie parody at the prom, but by tearing off everyone’s clothes instead of murdering them (spoiler for this movie, and Carrie, I suppose).

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