Summer School
Summer School
Freddy the gym teacher has to teach remedial English in summer (high) school, if he wants tenure. As he can only teach gym and his students want fun, emphasis is on "field trips" - until he's fired unless all his students pass the test.
Jacob O’Neal reviewedJuly 18, 2025
From the director of The Jerk, the stars of NCIS, Saw, Ski School, Cheers, Heathers, Melrose Place, Austin Powers and the creator of Full House comes Summer School. Carl Reiner directed this delightfully fun movie I’ve watched every summer since I was a child in the 80’s. The movie is about Mr. Shoop, a gym teacher forced to teach remedial English in summer school. A teacher who doesn’t know how to teach and students who don’t want to be there is the basic premise. Like any good 80’s film, it gets weird with underage male strippers, classroom screenings of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a field trip to the beach so the boys could see the foreign exchange student in a bikini and the goriest scene you’ll ever see in a PG-13 movie.
Everyone remembers Dave & Chainsaw in the movie, but there’s film was stacked with soon to be famous people, like Courtney Thorne Smith, Shawnee Smith, Mark Harmon (rising before and after this film) Patrick Layborteau of Heathers fame, Fabiana Udino (Alotta Fagina) and many others. It also boasted a music score from a young Danny Elfman with only a couple movies under his belt. The soundtrack featured Elizabeth Daily (Dottie from Pee-Wes’s Big Adventure) the movie was written by Jeff Franklin who was just about to launch Full House, his biggest success.
The movie was great in how it showed someone who actually grew to care about his students learn how to teach each and every one of them in a way that they understood. It also played with the ideas of being outcasts, having inappropriate crushes on your teachers, teenage pregnancy and underage drinking in a way that never felt preachy or like it judged the students. It straddled the line of being a grounded comedy and an absurd goofy comedy in ways only Carl Reiner could. The man was a genius and will forever be missed. If you haven’t seen this film and you’re a fan of Harmon, Reiner or Franklin then you may find something to enjoy in this film.