Girls in
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977)

Phoebe Cates’s other great ’80s teen sex comedy also

features Saw babe Betsy Russell, scream queen Brinke Stevens, and loads of sexy surprises.

If summertime 1982 served as cherry-popping Ground Zero for the decade’s teen sex comedy phenomenon—and seeing as it contained the premieres of Porky's, The Last American Virgin, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, it did—then the subsequent swelter season’s Private School (1983) was the first direct fallout. And what a gloriously radiant after-effect it is.

To be sure, a spate of raunchy teen farces did rush into theaters during the ’82-’83 school year—among them: The Beach Girls, Homework, Joysticks, Losin’ It, Goin’ All the Way, My Tutor, Pink Motel, Spring Break, (the mighty) Screwballs, and (the also mighty) Zapped!

But Private School represented Hollywood’s first full-scale attempt to concoct an all-out teen sex comedy blockbuster, calculatedly combining familiar genre tropes (nerds, jocks, nudity-producing pranks, cross-dressing one’s way into the girls’ shower room, etc.), and then adding Phoebe Cates—the naked girl from Fast Times—up on top like a beautiful, brown-nippled bow.