Incoming Freshmen (1979) User Reviews

A Cast Member's Take On I.F.

[jimoverbey · 2/10 · 21 June 2005]

while being one of the "stars" of this film doesn't necessarily give me sage insight, i do know quite a bit of what was first there...and what ended up on the screen. i remember seeing the original cut of "incoming freshman" and being very pleased. it was funny, sexy, raunchy, all the main requirements of a drive-in film. you have to remember this was shot and released before all the rest...animal house, porky's, etc...so in its own way, this flick was truly ahead of its time. for whatever reasons, the film was given to the main distributors who editing out half the original film, and then edited in (should i say "shuffled?") THE most random scenes ever. the fat guy, the people with goat heads....what the heck was all that?! i'm sure it was put in for additional T&A, but it was so slowly paced, it caused anything going on prior to it to grind to a screeching and painful halt. but all in all, it's a fun memory for me...especially in that i'm able to say that the worst movie i've ever seen...i'm in!

People Who Are Breast-Positive Will Like This Movie

[richard-morrison-1 · 19 November 2004]

It's Boobapalooza '79 when the kids of Incoming Freshmen spend their golden college years partying hard and shunning bras. This aggressively shameless soft core T'n'A crowd pleaser treats us to everything from a lecture by a naked ROTC instructor to a frat party being entertained by a blues-rock band wearing goat masks. The movie advances on two parallel tracks: the main story of innocent small-town coed Jane (Ashley Vaughn) being gradually corrupted by her slutty roommate Viv (Leslie Blalock) and that of the tribulations of neurotic, sexually repressed history professor L.P. Bilbo (B.M. Culpepper). Jane starts out dedicated to her long-distance high school sweetheart, only to have her heart broken when her best friend back home hooks up with Mr. Perfect the first week of college, leaving an opening for roommate Viv to introduce her to her own boyfriend's best friend, Randy (Richard Harriman, looking very much like a young Dave Barry). At the same time Prof. Bilbo has trouble keeping his attention on his teaching as he spend more of every class mentally undressing his female students.

Events come to a head the weekend of the big football game when Viv persuades Jane that they should ditch their respective boyfriends and hit a swingin' frat party by themselves. Everybody has fun, lots of tits are shown, and morbidly obese Prof. Bilbo shows up dressed in a white suit and announces his newfound goal of getting "funky." Uber-slut character Maxine "The Machine" (Georgia Harrell), clad only in an extremely revealing gold lame one-piece looks down the pants of a delighted nerd and announces "What, all that meat and no potatoes?" before dragging him back to the nearest bedroom. The film ends with what is essentially a take-a-number gang bang in which the walrus-like history professor takes on one svelte college girl after another, culminating, in the last few seconds, with plain Jane herself. Not too worry, though - Dave Barry Jr. has managed to meet the tube top-wearing girl he had fantasized about earlier in the movie. So everybody ends up happy, in one way or another.

Incoming Freshmen has a couple of good aspects - the comedy value of the extremely dated apparel (tight jeans, bellbottoms, tall white tube socks with brightly colored rings at the top) and the thick southern accents sported by virtually every cast member, except for Jane's Dave Barry-like boyfriend. These people make The Dukes of Hazzard sound like Masterpiece Theater. The poorly-aging trashiness of the era is palpable; the scene where roommates Jane and Viv go on a double date to the local disco is so intensely 70s it could power a time machine. Recommended to fans of That 70s Show and long-term freebase addicts. Oh yeah, and to people who like tits.

Bad, bad, bad movie

[bonwardulr · 1/10 · 3 May 2007]

I don't know where to begin. The cast is full of people who've never done anything before or since. Debralee Scott is listed on cover boxes, but does not appear in the movie at all. The writing is quite bad, even for college films. It's obviously very low budget, with one scene at the sorority house having extremely choppy editing.

The characters are pretty typical for college films - timid guy, nerd, suave black guy, tough guys, guy with mustache, attractive girl, small town girl, etc. The featured teacher is about what's you'd expect... middle aged heavy set guy who gets sidetracked easily.

If you wan't to see a college flick, stay clear from this one. It's so bad, it's not even funny.

Incoming Freshmen

[BandSAboutMovies · 2/10 · 22 August 2022]

Eric Lewald developed X-Men: The Animated Series, but before that he directed - with Glenn Morgan - and wrote this sex comedy that got distributed by Cannon that played drive-in double features with Gas Pump Girls.

It's about two roommates - small-town virgin Jane (Ashley Vaughn) and promiscuous Vivian (Leslie Blalock) - as they deal with their first year of college. Also, every few moments, a woman takes her clothes off because that's the kind of movie this is.

Shot in Knoxville, TN, this also has Georgina Harrell as Maxine "The Machine," a woman who will look down a man's pants and declare, "What? All meat and no potatoes?" She would parlay this experience into being in The First Turn-On!! It also has a band with goat masks, a dream sequence with pig masks and a heavy teacher called Professor L. P. Bilbo (B. M. Culpepper) who ends up gang banging with every female in the movie, including our formerly innocent protagonist Jane.

Several IMDB posters - who claim to be in the movie - say that this was shot on location by two University of Tennessee Graduate students and that Cannon added in all the sex scenes. I have no idea how they did that when the leads are in several of them, but maybe they mean the cutaways to more nudity. They also would like you to believe that the original version of this movie is a coming of age film instead a movie about coming, but this sounds like the way Christopher Lee would claim Jess Franco fooled him into being in a softcore movie and was so angry he was in several more of his movies.

Director's cut gets its due

[CrashBox · 7/10 · 16 July 2012]

The original edit of IF finally got a public showing on June 16, 2012 in Knoxville at the Relix Theatre, to an SRO crowd which included a couple of original cast members. The viewing was put on by the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound.

The original version is much better than what Cannon released, and the L.A. Times review from 1979 even mentioned that there seemed to be a disconnect between the two parts of the film.

Google "Knoxploitation" for a Metro Pulse story on the film and its production, which includes some fabulous stills shot during filming. A significant (or not) piece of the original was footage shot on US Highway 129 ("Deal's Gap" or "The Dragon" to tourists) from the back of a Ducati 750ss. This footage was included in the 2012 showing.

long lost cinema

[metalrox_2000 · 10/10 · 10 November 2007]

No, the acting won't be Oscar caliber. The film was shot on the cheap, and appears to have used many local actors. There is no real plot. The movie is very funny at times, and very, and I mean very dated at others. Yet, it's a really great throw back to an era of film making that's gone, and sadly, doesn't seem to be coming back. Rebecca Franklin, ALice Barrett, and Ashley Vaughn are genuine beautiful women who should have been given a shot to do other things. Barrett had the more of a career then the others. The saddest thing about the film is that Leslie Blalock died in a car accident before the film came out. Blalock was a calender girl come to life, live on film.

What needs to happen is the 70's drive in flicks need to find their way to DVD, via a box set, or on their own. Incoming Freshman is a drive in classic. A true gem of film-making that has been lost to history.

Original film nothing like what was released

[philhardison-1 · 24 September 2008]

I know several people who worked on Incoming Freshman and recently had an opportunity to view a black and white work print of the original edit. Not only was the film re-edited, but additional scenes were shot by the distributor which accounts for the much of gratuitous sex and nudity. This was done, obviously, to make the film more marketable. The original film was intelligent, well conceived and and not at all badly done considering the production budget was less than $50,000. It many ways, it was a much better film than Animal House which is often credited with being THE ground breaking film that started a new genre of movies. It was never intended to be a "soft porn" film, an unfortunate and undeserved characterization. The film was shot on location in Knoxville Tennessee by two University of Tennessee Graduate students. Many of the scenes were shot on and around campus and on the Cumberland Avenue strip. It would be worthwhile to somehow release a "restored" version of this film. If I'm not mistaken one or both of the directors did go on to have careers in Hollywood. My good friend Tommy Gibbons worked on Incoming Freshman as an assistant camera operator and is a great source of information on the film.

It could have been better

[filmjoe · 3 July 2002]

I saw this film before it was sold for distribution and it was a very good film. I saw it after distribution at the theater and it was a completely different film. The film had been totally re-cut. A number of new scenes (the awful "southern" professor and the T and A) were added and the original film was pretty much lost. The storyline had no continuity due to the re-editing.

Though as one other reviewer mentioned, it is somewhat like Animal House (1978), but for a low-budget film, with "no-name" actors, the original (before re-edit) film was as good.

In a word: Huh??!

[bigscren · 27 September 2003]

Well, partly based on the other comments here I bought Brentwood's "Toga Party" DVD set, which includes this among other fine films for a bargain price. We should all be thankful that this movie has been preserved on DVD, regardless of quality. This appears to have been shot on videotape, then transferred to film. My jaw dropped in several parts of this movie as I could not believe that it had actually been made. But that's OK, because I was expecting a bad movie, I just had no idea how bad! Anyone who thinks they have seen the worst movie ever made owes it to themself to see this- it's definitely in the top 50. (Those who think "Gigli" was bad haven't seen anything!)

Move over "Wet Hot American Summer"

[lightkeeper-1 · 5 September 2005]

I didn't think I would find another movie that ranks worse..even "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is better! I purchased Brentwood's Toga Party 10-movie 5-disc set last year but only viewed "Incoming Freshmen" yesterday. I purchased the set mainly because of Dennis Quaid in "Seniors". Doing research finds most of the cast of "Incoming Freshmen" never "acting" in another movie plus Leslie Blacock (Vivian Marie Roberson) died in a road accident in 1978 - a year before the movie was released. If this was theatrically released to play as a drive-in double feature, I certainly hope the other title was good enough to keep customers from driving off!

If I don't comment on this film, NOBODY will!

[Sum Flounder · 12 February 2002]

Actually, I typed this title just to see how thorough this database is. I was a bit surprised to see it here, but not that it hadn't been commented on. It played here in the early eighties with the far superior GAS PUMP GIRLS. It was a T'n'A ANIMAL HOUSE type of deal with a particularly cheap look. Stuff like this just doesn't make it into theatres anymore. There was a party scene where everybody wore goat masks. That's about all I remember. If I had seen this film by itself, I would have felt ripped off, but its companion film made the trip worthwhile.

Not too bad

[IBrakeForTrees · 1 April 2002]

Been a while seen I've seen it -- saw it on videotape in the 80s -- but I recall it wasn't too bad and had some cute girls. I can still recall the opening scene where the professor is imagining one of his students nude, so I have to say the movie is at least more memorable than a lot of the others of the same type.