Scott Strader stars as “The Kid,” a genius at playing tennis but also an irresponsible party animal. Along with his buddy Jeff (Perry Lang), they are off to Vegas to compete in the National Tennis Tournament. And they have to win because the president of their college, Mr. White (Christopher Lee), has informed Coach Beetlebom (R.G. Armstrong) that if they don’t win then the tennis program will have to be cut, along with the scholarships for most of the team. So the team and their coach, Chip Williams (Richard Roundtree), make for Vegas to bring back the win. While they are there, there are the usual teen comedy hi-jinks you come to expect from this sort of outing, plus the ending is pretty predictable for this era of filmmaking. Teen comedies were a big deal in the 80's. Just a few from the same year that JOCKS was made were: ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING, CAN’T BUY ME LOVE, MANNEQUIN, SUMMER SCHOOL, and FULL METAL JACKET. Uh, scratch that last one.

Anyway, Crown International had been bringing us tepid rip-offs of major motion picture box office successes, so it was inevitable that they would have to bombard us with teen comedies.

Unfortunately, they thought that making one about tennis with a bunch of guys who really don’t play tennis all that well would be a good idea. All I want to know is what kind of incriminating evidence did they have on people like Christopher Lee and Richard Roundtree to get them to agree to be in crap like this? They also play up the fact that Mariska Hargitay (television's “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit”) also is along for the ride and she plays this nicey-nicey chick from a competing school. Her performance in this is so damned saccharine that you can’t imagine how she managed to have a career after this one. Of course, she did manage to survive GHOULIES, so maybe she’s just bulletproof.

They have this fantastic cast of characters who, given the proper motivation and script, would have made a great little low budget flick. As it stands, they all seem to phone in their parts and we don’t get a lot of fun. There is one scene where Christopher Lee is questioning R.G. Armstrong in his office about not having won any championships lately and he uses a fencing foil to punctuate each sentence, poking Armstrong repeatedly. This was hilarious and the movie could have used so much more of this, especially afterwards when Armstrong leaves the room Lee hefts his sword and taunts the Three Musketeers. They’re not really there, he’s just playing and the fact that he played Rochefort in three films with the Musketeers in it makes this quite funny. But that’s really it for funny here.

And to make sure that we know that it’s a screwball teen comedy we have to have the appearance of Don Gibb aka Ogre from REVENGE OF THE NERDS. And to make sure that your suspension of disbelief is properly in place, they have him playing the part of A TENNIS PLAYER! Unbelievable.

When the climax of the movie rolls around, it's abruptly ends because, well, I suppose that the editor figured out that they had hit the 90 minute mark and that was good enough for Crown International Pictures. I really do have a soft spot for some of the teen comedies that came from the 80’s. That was when I was growing up and they make for great drive-in fodder. Unfortunately, JOCKS has a soft spot that I would like to hit with a ball-peen hammer to put it out of my misery.