As You Get Ready For South Padre: The Five Best Spring Break Movies

By Pete Vonder Haar Wed., Mar. 11 2009 at 7:03 AM

Categories: Movies

Spring Break! Since time immemorial (or the mid-20th century, anyway) it's been a rite of passage for college students to spend their days on the beach, presenting their hindquarters to potential suitors, and their nights crammed into structurally unsound firetraps alongside hundreds of potential date rapists and venereal-disease vectors. Cherish those memories, if you still retain any.

5. Where the Boys Are (1960) For a movie released when Americans only had missionary position sex while fully clothed on a mattress stuffed with Bibles, WTBA is surprisingly risqué and would lay the sexy groundwork for all subsequent Spring Break movies to follow. And as the clip makes clear: big-footed women need sexin' up, too.

4. Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987) Bradley Whitford -- playing totally against type as a smug prick -- learns a painful lesson the Tri-Lams have known since the first movie: always bet on black.

3. Losin' It (1983) Like the moon, time is a harsh mistress, transforming an only-slightly creepy Jackie Earle Haley into the psychopathic Rorschach and a not-at-all creepy Tom Cruise into a dead-eyed Scientologist loon. Where is your Shelley Long now?

2. Spring Break (1983) One of the first in the storied 1980s-era wave of movies encouraging students to 'get your ass to Lauderdale' (to coin a phrase), this was produced by the same sinister hotel industry/beverage distributor cabal that gave us Hardbodies, Fraternity Vacation, and...uh, Motel Hell. I have no evidence for the previous statement.

1. The Sure Thing (1985) I know I'm not the only teenager who aspired to John Cusack's lofty standards of self-awareness and asceticism, and I also know I'm not the only one who -- were I also confronted with a choice between the shrill, bookish Daphne Zuniga and the willing, pulchritudinous Nicollette Sheridan -- would have fallen far, far short.