This would have received 1 star but Angel Tompkins' bare breasts are worth at least one star by themselves. If there had been more bare breasts, I would have added more stars.The Teacher is a morality tale. Societies should beware of single women. They'll seduce our innocent sons and drive our already insane vets into homicidal rages.Though this movie was made in the 1970s, its temporal setting is the 1950s. Not only is Diane, the teacher, single, but she's divorced. One of her friends hints at how sexually frustrated Diane must be with her husband gone. Clearly there's nothing a woman can do to relieve her sexual frustrations without a man.Diane is so oblivious that her breasts are responsible for the deaths of three people. First one of her two infatuated students dies while looking at her bare breasts in the harbor. (I've spent a lot of time on and around the water and I've never seen a bare breast.) Then his friend is killed by the insane brother of his dead friend who happens to be a veteran. Then she kills the friend's insane veteran brother as he's raping her. (I guess that one she knows what's going on.)The sex scenes are bizarre. When Diane takes Sean's virginity, he has his pants on. The scene is the least tender sex scene I've seen. She isn't "making love" with him. She's raping him. It's written all over her face. He seems to enjoy it. (What 18 year old boy wouldn't?) When she asks him if he wants to do it again, he tells her, "Once is enough." (Okay, so one 18 year old boy wouldn't.)They leave their pants on when they swap bodily fluids on her boat. She and Ralph both have pants on when Ralph rapes her.I guess the moral should be, "Don't trust divorced women. They'll seduce our sons and teach them how to dry hump."If this movie was better known, it would challenge Ed Wood's "Plan 9" for the Golden Turkey.

One of the handful of pictures made by Hikmet Avedis, a classifiable low-budget director of not-quite schlock and drive-in flicks, The Teacher is ostensibly about a 28 year old teacher (lovely Angel Tompkins)- the hottie of the town without a husband as he's a drifter/biker somewheres- who bonds with the shy 18 year old former student neighbor (1/2 dimensional Jay North) and start up a passionate affair. This part of the story is basically more or less just a Penthouse letter extended to feature length (and, oddly enough for a drive-in flick, the amount of sex is actually shown to a minimum, above the belt as it were). What makes it just a little bit more interesting, if also insane, is the character Ralph (crazy-eyed Anthony James), who comes off like a 2nd string James Bond villain missing a couple of acting classes.He's weird and a snoop, with an obsession with Diane holding a torch for her unofficially while also trying to hunt down Sean after the death of his younger brother. It seems stranger still why Ralph would be so distraught over his brother's death when all Ralph seems to do is sit in his warehouse by the harbor, take out a pair of binoculars from his coffin (which comes out of the mysterious hearse he drives around) which also has a rifle. But he's a villain nonetheless, creeping up at pretty much any instance Sean and Diane are out, or even while they're on her boat making love as he creeps up like a Z-grade Aquaman.If nothing else his ridiculous performance of an even sillier, deranged cat makes it watchable, when all else is just kind of mundane romance (North especially can barely act his way out of a paper bag, at least Tompkins has her sex appeal). It's nothing very special, or memorable, but if the title ever came up in conversation it would be fun to wax poetic about Anthony James as Ralph, or to contemplate the ways it could make a decent self-made MST3K feature.

THE PLOT: An 18 year old virgin (North) is seduced by his teacher (Tompkins) while fighting off a weird stalker (James).THE NEGATIVE: This film is excruciatingly dull and is loaded with too much meandering dialog and scenes that go nowhere. The story itself is too simple and offers no surprises or interesting twists. It has no business taking up ninety-eight minutes of time to get where it is going. The sex scenes are not titillating at all and their confrontations with the psychotic James are uninspired. There is also a syrupy sweet theme music that is absolutely awful and it gets played over and over again during the whole movie.THE POSITIVE: Seeing TV's Dennis the Menace all grown up and in a promiscuous role is fun for a few seconds as well as seeing Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes mother's in a brief cameo during a restaurant scene.THE LOWDOWN: This movie needed a lot more sex, scares, and humor to make it even halfway entertaining. This is basically just a one note story that takes way too long to play out.THE RATING: 1 out of 10.

This was a surprise for me as I was expected a much more shabby offering and having already enjoyed Pick-Up on the same disc nearly didn't bother with it. But, it's really well done. True, some of the acting is a little wayward and although Jay North plays the reluctant young man a little too much at first, once he gets into his stride the pairing with the well on form, Angel Tomkins, works very well. In fact for once the older woman/younger man coming together is pretty believable. This may be because the actual discrepancy between their ages was almost that mentioned in the film, although eight years rather than ten. Admittedly Anthony James' weirdo is somewhat over the top but altogether I think the whole thing gels and I found that instead of much disc skipping, I had a most enjoyable ninety minutes or so in its company