It's no secret that I hold the original Revenge of the Nerds with a high regard reserved for only the most choice of the 80's T&A comedies I grew up with. It's right in there with Porky's and Screwballs as a movie I can repeatedly watch and still grin like an idiot like I did when I first saw it as an impressionable (and horny) youngster. What's more surprising to me, especially since it was a watered-down PG-13 follow-up, is how entertained I was by the sequel. That might be why, when Fox resurrected the series in 1992 with this, the first of two made-for-TV flicks, I wondered how things went from raunchy humour and boobs to something on the same level as your basic sit-com. Then again, maybe it was Fox trying to cash-in on the name since their attempt a year earlier to launch a series ended in failure - the un-aired pilot can be seen on the original film's DVD if you're curious to see how awful it is.

Subtitled, The Next Generation, this third entry brought back a lot of the cast from the first two flicks and they even managed to sign up the original film's writers Steve Zacharias and Jeff Buhai, which might explain why this feels a lot like the previous entries as it treads the same, familiar, footsteps. This isn't particularly a bad thing even though I sat there hoping for someone to either a) blurt out the words "Hair pie!" repeatedly or, b) come up with an elaborate, and offensive, plan to get back at the jocks. This isn't the Nerds I came to love in 1984 but I'm pretty okay with that.

Since the events of the last two movies Adams College has become a nerd paradise where the smart are treated like royalty and the sports teams aren't given a second glance. Lewis (Robert Carradine) has grown to become a businessman Yuppie trying to hide his nerd past while Stan (Ted McGinley) is now a policeman. Along comes wealthy alumni Orrin Price (Morton Downey, Jr.) who wants his son to attend the school and is disgusted by the change that's come over his beloved Adams. He comes up with a scheme to get Stan elected Dean and help the jocks in Alpha Beta fraternity to take back the campus. It's up to Lewis' nephew Harold (Gregg Binkley) and his best friend Ira (Richard Israel) to go on a quest to recruit all the campus nerds, as well as his Uncle and the former Lamda Lamda Lamda brothers, in order to fight back and keep Adams a safe haven for nerds everywhere.

Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation wasn't nearly as terrible as I was expecting. In fact, it was kind of fun. Zacharias and Buhai don't paint their characters with the broad strokes they did in the past but they still exude wacky charm and there's enough chuckles here that, until a junky courtroom based finale that gives the film its poorest moments, I was pleasantly entertained.

I have to give a lot of the credit for that to the likable cast. Even though Carradine's performance seems on autopilot he's still the Lewis we rooted for in the past. Binkley and Israel are quite engaging as the main focus of the story and, even though he doesn't show-up until the halfway point, Curtis Armstrong steals the show as the loveable slob "Booger". Also of note, be on the lookout for character actor Clancy Brown (Starship Troopers, Pet Sematary II) in a bit role as a gas station attendant.

If you're a fan of the previous entries, you'll probably get some enjoyment out of this. It's a harmless way to spend an hour-and-a-half of your time and makes for a pleasant distraction. There's no way this can match the, in my eyes, classic original but they're not trying to reinvent the wheel here, they're just bringing back familiar characters for another romp. There'd be one more sequel after this, Nerds in Love, which I seem to recall liking the least of them all. (Chris Hartley, 8/2/09)

Directed By: Roland Mesa.
Written By: Steve Zacharias, Jeff Buhai.

Starring: Rober Carradine, Ted McGinley, Curtis Armstrong, Julia Montgomery.