35 Years Ago: The ‘Nerds’ Franchise Starts To Spiral With ‘II’

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Although this plot is ridiculous, it's not really the problem with the film. Nor is the cast, which is mostly intact from the first movie, with one major exception. Robert Carradine (from the famous acting family) is back as Lewis Skolnick, Curtis Armstrong reappears as "Booger," Donald Gibb once again plays Ogre, and even the venerable James Cromwell reprises his role as Lewis's father.

The exception is Anthony Edwards, who had starred in the first film alongside Carradine as Gilbert Lowe, but chose not to be featured prominently in the sequel. (His appearance in Top Gun from 1986 may have had something to do with it.) Edwards' sweet earnestness is greatly missed. Without his steadying influence, and the emotional center of his friendship with Lewis, the film feels almost immediately stale.

This flatness pervades a great deal of Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise, which seems to trade its underdog comedy for overused tropes, and to turn what had once been a surprising worldview into a kind of winking, insider joke. This is evident in the opening, which finds a pocket protector flying through space, followed by scrolling text in a Star Wars homage. It's a flat gag, already overused by 1987, at which point George Lucas's masterpiece was a decade old.

Unfortunately, that falls in line with most of the other gags in the film, from the broken-down hotel the nerds inhabit to the rather barbaric parody of the Seminole Indians, to the Stripes-style military bit at the end. Three years after the first film, the ugly specter of cliché is already rearing its head.

The original Revenge of the Nerds is by no means a great movie, although it has developed something of a cult following. (The less said about its view of women and minorities, the better.) At the same time, however, part of the secret of its success is the film had a certain freshness, and Revenge of the Nerds wore its heart on its sleeve. Unfortunately, the sequel feels like a pale imitation: What was once a sly statement of anti-mainstream sentiment was already becoming co-opted by the culture it once tried to subvert.