The Boyfriend School is a 1990 romantic comedy starting Steve Guttenberg, Shelley Long, and Jami Gertz.
Gus is a magazine cartoonist who just recovered from cancer, with his sister Lizzie, a successful romance novelist, trying to set him up. In comes single reporter Emily who just interviewed Lizzie. After a disastrous dinner, Lizzie decides to remake Gus into a romance novel hero.
What follows is Gus's Training from Hell as he does what he can to enchant Emily as the New Zealand Biker Lobo.
This film contains examples of:
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: Gus is persuaded by his romance novelist sister to adopt the persona of Lobo Marunga, a long-haired leather-clad biker from New Zealand, in order to win over the girl he's fallen for. The ruse falls apart eventually, but it definitely does the job of attracting her interest.
- Makeover Montage: Pre-makeover Gus is post-cancer bald and overweight, but in order to try to seduce Emily, the girl of his dreams, he spends months losing weight, exercising, getting tanned, and getting his newly grown hair cut and styled. He also gets a wardrobe change, contacts, and an accent to become the dream guy, Lobo.
- What the Hell Is That Accent?: Deliberately invoked by Lizzie when creating the persona of Lobo: the only accent Gus could reasonably pull off is one that not a lot of Americans could identify, so they wouldn't realize how fake it sounds. That being said, it's not a terrible attempt at it.
