Last night I watched a movie no one should be subjected to.

“So I have a core memory of this movie.” 

Alissa nodded, halfway smiling. Movies. Television. A vast collection committed to memory. Like a few titles many people have never heard of: Battle Beyond the Stars. Barry Gordy’s The Last Dragon. (I’m including that one for my friend, Alithfya. You’re welcome.) And, of course, one of my absolute favorite 80s sci-fi movies, The Last Starfighter, starring Robert Preston, also known as the sleazy salesman in The Music Man. 

She knew it was bad in the first ten minutes. I knew it long before I hit play. But we watched it anyway — me for nostalgia, Alissa for reasons I can only describe as tolerance and or love for me. Probably in that order.

The movie was Combat Academy, or Combat High as it was known when it was released in 1986. An NBC made-for-TV, cheap, cheerful rip-off of Police Academy set inside a high school military academy, featuring two high school pranksters sentenced by a judge to a year of discipline they had no intention of accepting.

The writing? Oh it was awful. I don’t say that lightly. The dialogue was predictable. So was the storyline. 

However even awful writing shines the light on great actors, if you are paying attention. 

Apparently I was.

Bernie Kopell, Doc from The Love Boat, shows up as the dad. Sherman Hemsley, Mr. Jefferson himself, plays the judge who sends the kids to Kirkland Academy. Jamie Farr, straight off M*A*S*H, plays the Colonel, keeping the principal and his commanding officer in check. And Wallace Langham, who you now know as David Hodges on CSI, is one of the two leads.

Then there’s the man, George Clooney. Twenty-five years old, doing his level best to play a military cadet with a character arc the script couldn’t quite hold together. He’s charming anyway. He’s always charming. You watch him and think — he is going to be somebody regardless of what garbage script they handed him.

It all started, as these things often do for me, with a song. 

One song. I heard it in 1986 and it was so catchy, that it never quite left. 

David Byrne performing “Burnin’ Down the House” on the last Stephen Colbert show. That’s the spark that started this fire. So like any good instigator, of course I fanned those flames into a roaring fire, namely watching Combat High.

Alissa sat next to me through all of it. No complaints. Just the quiet, generous tolerance of someone who understands that sometimes the people they love need to go back to 1986 for an hour and a half.

That’s no small thing.

If you watch Combat Academy for what it is — a low-budget, campy Police Academy knockoff that somehow assembled a murderers’ row of 80s TV talent — it nails exactly what it set out to do. If you watch it for any other reason, other than to be entertained? I’d suggest watching something else.

But I watched it with Alissa. She shared that moment with me. That made it exactly what it needed to be. 

And I seriously doubt we’ll ever watch it again.