There are bad movies. Then there are movies that feel like they crawled out of a 99-cent VHS bin at a truck stop in 1997, smelling like melted plastic and broken dreams. The Boyfriend School is one of those movies.
It stars Steve Guttenberg, fresh off the fumes of Police Academy mediocrity, playing a cartoonist named Gus who survives cancer but loses all dignity somewhere around the second act. In true 1990s rom-com logic, the only way he can get a woman is to undergo a full-blown identity transformation—complete with a leather jacket, fake accent, and a greasy ponytail that looks like it was glued on with desperation and hair gel.
See, Gus’ sister Lizzie (played by Shelley Long, bless her) is a romance novelist. She decides that the only way her newly recovered, kind-hearted, cancer-surviving brother can score is by pretending to be some Harlequin biker dreamboat named Lobo. Yes. Lobo.
And somehow, this tactic works. Because enter Jami Gertz, playing Emily, a journalist whose type is apparently “borderline delusional man pretending to be Fabio’s less hygienic cousin.”
This movie is a fever dream of bad decisions, baffling montages, and one of the worst romantic setups ever committed to celluloid. Instead of focusing on, say, actual emotional connection or mutual interests, The Boyfriend School barrels forward with the subtlety of a flaming garbage truck. Its core message? “Women only want the brooding bad boy, so lie until they fall in love with you.”
Genius.
It’s not even fun-bad. It’s slow. It drags like a wounded animal toward the inevitable “he was lying the whole time but somehow she loves him anyway” ending. And don’t worry—there’s a climactic public confession scene involving motorcycles, leather, and romantic clichés so thick they could choke a Hallmark executive.
Guttenberg’s attempt at rugged is like watching a golden retriever try to play Batman. It’s adorable at first, then just deeply unsettling. Jami Gertz, bless her again, is charming enough to almost sell it—but even she looks like she’s wondering where her career went wrong.
And let’s not forget Shelley Long, stuck in the “quirky matchmaking sister” role, delivering dialogue that sounds like it was lifted straight from the back cover of a grocery store paperback novel. If she was paid in embarrassment, she’d be a millionaire.
Final Verdict
The Boyfriend School is the cinematic equivalent of catfishing your crush while recovering from chemo and getting advice from someone who writes fiction for people with oxygen-deprived brains. It’s tone-deaf, misguided, and aged like milk in a hot car.
One point for Jami Gertz’s charm. The rest of this movie should’ve stayed in the notebook of a confused 10th-grade creative writing student.
1.5 out of 5 mullets.
The .5 is for the guts it took to release this in theaters with a straight face.
