It’s the last three weeks of the Coolidge Corner’s " ’80s Teen Movie Explosion," cosmic midnights each Friday and Saturday. What’s left: Phil Joanou’s Three O’Clock High (1987; June 14-15) and John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986; June 21-22) and Weird Science (1985; June 28-29).

I must admit I have trouble relating to Three O’Clock High’s scaredy-cat twerp, Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko), who’s tied up in a pretzel after being challenged to an after-hours fight by the towering school bully, Buddy Revell (Richard Tyson). Relax, Jerry! I too was a pint-sized dweeb, but I sport a Marciano-like 2-0 schoolyard scuffle record. The first time, bursting with pre-testosterone, I leapt on a fellow fourth-grade runt and pinned his skinny arms to the ground. Victory! The second battle was coldly, calculatedly Darwinian. In my fifth grade, one 50-pound kid was the runt of the litter. Who was second-weakest? Third? This academic debate was answered when, encircled by classmates, I wrangled this pale ninny (Charles was his effete name!) until he muttered a grudging "Uncle!" Hooray! I was third-weakest! Pardon my manly bragging!

Back to Three O’Clock High, where Jerry, assigned to interview bad Buddy for the high-school rag, accidentally touches his touchy subject. "You can take your newspaper and wipe your dick with it," says Buddy before the shivery challenge for three o’clock fisticuffs: "If you tell a teacher, it will be even worse! You sneak home, I’ll be under your bed." Three O’Clock High plays out as a spoof of High Noon, in which ticking-away clocks point toward marshal Gary Cooper’s reluctant duel in the midday sun. Here, too, clocks move toward that frightful end-of-the-school day. In Three O’Clock High’s funniest scene, a banal 16mm film projected in Jerry’s science class, The Wonderful World of Insects, proves as ominous as the clocks, showing a scorpion in the path of a "small, non-aggressive cricket" turning that cricket into mush.

The fight is a pretty good one, a nice payoff for a forgotten teen movie. Maybe we’d remember it if the lead, Casey Siemaszko, weren’t so darned square. But these are the Reagan years, remember, and that’s why Siemaszko, who looks like the treasurer of the Republican Club, is the hero, and the James Dean-like outsider, Buddy, is the villain. And all hail the suburbanite protagonists of Weird Science and Ferris Bueller, both of which are set in Caucasian enclaves (Wilmette? Evanston?) in Chicago.

Except for Anthony Michael Hall’s lively performance, Weird Science makes me chuck up. Is there any ’80s film that more offensively rebuffs ’70s feminism than this tale of two losers who create, to be their sex slave, a simulated Barbarella thing on their computer (Kelly LeBrock, whom only a Hugh Hefner type could think erotic)? With a girl in tow, the nerd boys become popular with their future-frat peers. In an amazing moment of woman-as-exchange, Gary (Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) swap their simulacrum gal, whom they’ve labeled Lisa, for two flesh-and-blood ones. They agree to this pimp offer from another high-schooler: "You let us have a crack at Lisa and we’ll give you Deb and Hilly."

Is that enough? How about 23-year-old Lisa wildly kissing 15-year-old Wyatt and grabbing his buns? Does John Ashcroft know about Weird Science (it’s available on tape and DVD, of course), with this scene of underage sex? Then there’s that troubling scene where Gary and Wyatt enter a nightclub of territorial African-Americans and tame them by talking jive: "I was insane for this little eighth-grade bitch," says Gary, with a slurry, coonish intonation. Shouldn’t these little muthahs be decked for their condescending parody of black talk? Not in the lily-white world view of John Hughes, which reaches an apotheosis in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

I know, this one’s loads of fun, and Matthew Broderick is a charmer as the oft-fibbing kid who exchanges a stultifying day at school for a Cubs game, an art museum, smooching time with his girlfriend, a parade, and dancing in the streets of Chicago. But what of his ’80s Wall Street philosophy? "Isms are not good. You shouldn’t believe in isms. . . . Only the meek get pinched, the bold survive." Note that he’s a privileged rich kid residing in a presidential home with pillars and a circular driveway, a regular junior Reagan. "He’s very popular," says his jealous principal (Jeffrey Jones), who’s as frustrated in his attempts to catch Ferris out as Mondale and Dukakis were in trying to foil the contra-era Republicans.