My parents maintained a pretty liberal movie policy when I was growing up. Unlike a lot of Utah households, “R” movies weren’t automatically prohibited from our home simply because of their rating. Instead, my folks — well, my mom, since Dad was never much interested in movies — would do a little research and maybe a preview screening to find out exactly why the movie was rated R. Bad language was no problem, since she correctly assumed that I’d already heard every naughty word in the book (and quite a few that no one’s bothered to write down) while hanging out with my dad in the garage. Violence was likewise allowable, once I got old enough to stop having bad dreams brought on what’s now euphemistically called “intense content” by the MPAA. (For example, she flatly refused to let my uncle take me to see Alien on the big screen when it first came out — I was around nine, as I recall — but she gave her blessing for me to see it on video a couple of years later. Looking back, I think that was a wise decision. I love the flick now, but at nine… well, I probably would’ve had nightmares for years.)

Sex, however, was a little more complicated. Mom generally didn’t get upset at brief flashes of nudity or Benny Hill-style innuendo. (I guess her thinking was that if I was laughing, I couldn’t be getting too many ideas, or maybe she just liked the fact that Dad and I, who generally had so little in common, both enjoyed Benny’s hijinks.) But she became very uncomfortable with anything more, well, educational. This, of course, made such movies intensely appealing to me. However, being a good boy who always followed his mother’s wishes — i.e., a kid who was prone to fantastic bouts of guilt at the thought of “getting in trouble” — I never tried to sneak around behind her back like some kids would’ve. If Mom didn’t think I ought to see something, I didn’t see it. And that’s how I missed out on a landmark movie called Porky’s.

I don’t know if Porky’s is very well remembered today. I haven’t stumbled across any fanboy cults devoted to it, or read any fond reminiscences about it on people’s blogs. Truth is, I haven’t heard anyone so much as utter the title in years, aside from a few passing references when the film’s director, Bob Clark, died recently. Reminiscences about him rightfully focused on his beloved holiday film, A Christmas Story, instead. But years ago, back when I was in the first thrilling, confusing flush of puberty, Porky’s was the movie everyone was talking about. Because it was dirty, you see, and for we, ahem, men of a certain age, it was likely the first dirty movie we’d ever encountered.

The handful of my peers who’d managed to sneak a look at it could hardly contain themselves as they described the key scenes for rapt audiences of boys like myself, boys who were too repressed, too chicken, or too damn goody-goody to have seen it themselves. The Shower Scene and the secret of a character named “Lassie” took on the quality of legends as they were retold in the dank, overheated atmosphere of my middle-school locker room, and the bad boys who had learned these legends from the font itself appeared to we poor video-virgins as the demigod Heroes of Olde.

I had no doubt that to see Porky’s was to experience a glorious exaltation unlike any I’d ever known, but I also knew that odds of me attaining this ecstasy were slim. Kids weren’t the only ones gossiping about this notoriously raunchy film; our parents were talking, too, and my mom would surely freak if I asked her to rent it. I also knew she’d kill me if she ever found out that I’d secretly watched it at a friend’s house. For an offense like that, my dad would probably be brought into the situation, and that was pretty much the worst thing I could imagine. So I played it safe. Grudgingly, inevitably, irresistibly safe. Even when my good buddy Kurt Stephensen announced that his older brother had rented it for him while his dad was out town — Kurt’s dad was a divorced long-haul trucker who was gone on runs for a couple weeks at time, and Kurt was trusted to look after himself during those absences — my conscience got the better of me and I turned down his invitation to come over and check it out.

Ironically, I can recall seeing lots of other sex comedies at Kurt’s house, but Porky’s was something different, something more potent, more corrosively dangerous. Or so its reputation made it out to be. And, as I’ve already mentioned, I was a chicken, afraid of displeasing my parents, even if they never found out I’d done so.

The bottom line here is that I didn’t see the movie back when it was important to see it, back when people were still talking about it. By the time Mom finally gave up on continuing to censor my viewing, Porky’s was old news, and there were lots of other titles ahead of it on my rental list. I simply never got around to picking it up. Until a couple weeks ago, that is, when something triggered a dusty memory file and I decided on a whim to satisfy the curiosity that had been buried far back in the reptilian part of my brain ever since middle school.

Oh, boy.

What an incredible letdown.

Porky’s sucked.

I mean, it really sucked.

I sat on The Girlfriend’s couch for 90 painfully laugh-free minutes, cradling my chin in my hands and wondering what in the hell the big deal had been way back in 1982.

You see, I was expecting something like American Pie, an obvious descendant of Porky’s with its plot about a group of high-school boys trying desperately to lose their virginity before graduation. I really liked that movie, even though I can’t look anyone in the eyes when I admit that, because underneath its raunchy, dessert-molesting surface, it’s actually quite a sweet little story, populated by endearing, tender-hearted, and, above all, real characters, both the boys and the girls.

Porky’s, on the other hand, is neither endearing nor tender-hearted. It’s crass and vulgar, and filled with filthy-mouthed cardboard cut-outs that don’t resemble any genuine human being, either living or dead. The boy characters in the film are so thinly drawn that I frankly had a hard time telling them apart. And for a movie that’s all about the pursuit of the opposite sex, the girl characters are practically (and surprisingly) non-existent. They’re not even there as objects; aside from “Lassie” (who I was amused to see was played by a young Kim Cattrall of Sex and the City fame), none of the female cast gets more than a few seconds of screen time.

Porky’s wasn’t likable. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t even sexy, since all the nudity was depressingly pedestrian and the one scene of actual copulation was as joyless as a low-rent peep-show loop. About all it really was, was just what it’s reputation always made it out to be: dirty.

And that’s the only explanation for its early success that I can come up with. Dramas had been filled with boobies and debauchery for over 10 years at that point, and Animal House showed college-age people in the pursuit of, erm, happiness. But as far as I know, Porky’s was the first really frank movie about teenagers, which no doubt was a big part of why actual teenagers like myself were so fascinated by it. We thought we could relate to it. Too bad it wasn’t a movie we really could relate to, a movie about genuine teenagers like American Pie.

The coda to today’s tale is this: a few days after I suffered through my screening of this miserable little butt-nugget of a movie, I happened to mention to my mom that I’d finally seen the Great Forbidden Film. Her reaction?

“Oh, my god, wasn’t that a stupid damn movie?”

It seems she’d seen it herself for the first time just a year or so ago. And as I laughed and nodded my agreement, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t such a bad thing to have actually listened to my mother way back in 1982…