Review by Andy Comer
Directed by: Chris Nickin
Starring: Ron Jeremy, Dustin Diamond, Dan Severn,
Tetherball: The Movie chronicles four drunken douchebags rising to small town fame via a tetherball tournament broadcast on a public access channel. I’m not entirely sure how we got to the point that a competitive tetherball movie was made, let alone with such an obnoxious cast of characters, so many kicks to the nuts, and so much nudity, alcohol, and expletives. Maybe that will be the charm of the movie to some, but when I think of tetherball I think of kids and older people playing in some park on a nice afternoon. Extreme tag team tetherball between college dropouts and bikers in a wrestling ring doesn’t really come to mind.
None of these guys go through anything even resembling a character arc except for Zach, the lead of the movie, who starts off as a guy who lies to women to sleep with him, but once he gets a shot with the girl he likes, he starts to turn his life around in a couple ways, but then the script makes the other jackass characters ruin his character's moments of growth. Everyone else in the main cast is here just to fulfill their overdone annoying character traits over and over again. There is Mikey, the fat, ALWAYS drunken idiot, Alex, the hipster who makes girls dress up like animals before banging them, and Joe, who is the loser that the group lets tag along for no reason but to make themselves feel better.
Then there are the two big surprise guest stars. Ron Jeremy plays the maniacal villain, Jack, who sets up the entire tournament so he and his partner can have sex with Zach (For the record, Zach isn’t gay, but one of the more annoying gags throughout the movie is that his eyes apparently make every other male in the film think that he is). And then there's Dustin Diamond, who shortly plays their coach. When I say shortly, I mean shortly. He coaches them up before the tournament, but when asked if he was going to watch their game, he replies he is going to prison starting the day of their game, but instead he kills himself the night before. Basically a completely pointless role.
Ultimately, nothing helps this movie become engaging or entertaining besides the surprising amount of naked women swarming these loser characters. Even just changing the game from tetherball to almost anything else like dodgeball or basketball would have been infinitely better suited for these characters, and thus made the story a bit more accessible. Tetherball just doesn’t fit. It’s a game played primarily by children and older people, not 20 year old drunks who just enjoy banging random hot chicks in animal outfits. And in all honesty, it felt like a cheap knock off of Baseketball, but at least that was fun and had a bit of logic to it. This was a boring, drunken, boob-fest, from beginning to end.
