Burl reviews Hurray - The Swedes Are Here! (1978)

 

By all that’s Bavarian, it’s Burl, here to review one of the many, many, many sex comedies made in and around Bavaria in the 70s and 80s, usually involving hotels, burgomeisters, and Swedish girls! You might recall High Test Girls, which was about six Swedish girls arriving to take over a gas station; well, this one is pretty similar, and it goes by the English title of Hooray - The Swedes Are Here!

Of course there’s no plot, ha ha, no plot at all, but if you’ve read my reviews you know that’s not always a problem, especially with movies like this! The setting is a small Bavarian town, and it seems the burgomeister has given a strapping local lad named Niki Moser a big loan so that Niki can buy a hotel; but the agreement is that Niki will then marry the burgomeister’s perpetually nude daughter Marianne! But he doesn’t want to, and so the solution, suggested by Niki’s friend Tony, is to get a government subsidy to develop the hotel, so that Niki can repay the burgomeister and not be obliged to marry Marianne and this in turn requires that a government minister be fooled into believing the hotel is fully booked with guests so he will okay the subsidy!

The handsy old government official brings his girlfriend to the hotel for a dirty weekend while he considers whether Niki deserves the government subsidy, although he stops along the way to first get pooped on by a cow and then to take his mistress dirndl shopping! It looks bad for Niki, as, aside from a newlywed couple, one of whom is the gayest man alive, the other an understandably frustrated woman, the hotel is almost completely free of guests! Luckily a quintet of pulchritudinous Swedes shows up, followed by, out of nowhere, a marching oompah band! Everyone is soon having sex, ha ha!

The picture is full to bursting with hoary old jokes - they even try on the one about the fly in the soup! Ha ha, that one had whiskers when the Muppets did it, which I guess was around the same time as this! And of course there are pies in the face too, ha ha, because you can’t have a picture like this without pies in the face! And as the five Swedes gambol topless around the pool, a small boy in a Tyrolean hat peeks in and demands they give him a Tampax, because he’s heard that with one you can go swimming, horseback riding, hang gliding, and so forth! Ha ha, another fosselized old chestnut! And then of course there's the one about the exploding outhouse!

Now I haven’t seen a lot of these German bedroom-polka pictures, but I still recognized some of the faces here! Marianne, the burgomeister’s daughter, is black for some reason, and she’s played by Scarlett Gunden from Melody in Love! Why Niki is so reluctant to marry her is anybody’s guess, because she’s good-natured and very gorgeous! Niki himself is played by Wolf Goldan, who was also in Melody in Love, and of course played one of The Three Superguys! Bea Fiedler from Summer Night Fever and Hot Chili is in here, as is Renate Langer also from Summer Night Fever! And of course there’s Rosi Meyer, the same gurning old lady who seems to be in all of these pictures, including of course Has Anybody Seen My Pants? Ha ha, in fact the movie opens with some outhouse jokes performed by her and the burgomeister!

Finally Niki realizes that Marianne is a) cute, b) nice, and c) naked all the time, so it all ends the only way it could: with the triumphant blare of an oompah band, some slow-motion running through an alpine meadow, the tearing off of a dirndl, and a tilt up to a mountain that looks like a breast! Ha ha! Because I enjoyed watching it, and because I like writing dirndl, I’m gong to give Hooray - The Swedes Are Here three dirndls!

Burl reviews High Test Girls! (1980)

Ha ha and hi-test, it’s Burl, here with a review of a picture that’s not pornoo, but darn near! In fact, as with The Sensuous Caterer, some choppy and abrupt editing leads me to believe the original version probably did dally in the realm of hardcore pornoo, but, ha ha, I’m just fine with the R rated version thank you very much! The picture in question is the work of the prolific German erotechnician Erwin C. Dietrich, and, among other assorted monikers, (Six Swedes At A Pump, Swedish Gas Pump Girls) it’s called High Test Girls!

Brigitte Lahaie, from Night of the Hunted and other Jean Rollin pictures, plays one of a sextet (ha ha!) of Swedish girls who operate a gas station and restaurant called GROTTO in some small Bavarian mountain town! Well, it’s of course a station that offers FULL SERVICE, and this has the burgomeister of the town in a real tizzy! It’s a moral outrage, or so he claims!

Ha ha, the English dubbing voice this burgomeister has been given is a real hum-dinger, and I’m pretty sure I may have heard it before in either Melody in Love or Summer Night Fever! At any rate, the movie is crowded with scenes of the burgomeister arriving for a council meeting and grumping that one member is late; then the council member shows up and makes excuses! Ha ha, but what the burgomaster doesn’t know is that each time a member is late to the five-person council, it’s because he’s been playing a game of bedroom quoits with the burgomeister’s wife!

In between these scenes we get some of the various erotic vignettes that occur at GROTTO, including one bizarre and fastastical scene involving a bearded fellow on television who is able to effect physical manipulation of a lady over the airwaves, providing she gets close enough to her TV! Ha ha, talk about your high definition! And of course every time a gentleman pulls up at the gas bar, one of the Swedes jumps to the pump with an offer of FULL SERVICE! That one never gets old!

As you might have discerned, this is a pretty plotless movie! So far as it has a narrative, it involves the town council’s very slow move toward shutting down the Swedish girls’ service station, or at least investigating it more closely! At the same time, however, all the council and many of the townsmen are members of the local oompah band, which needs a place to practice for the upcoming town fete! They settle on using GROTTO as their practice location, and in an climax scored to endless oompah music, the members of the oompah band head upstairs one by one to visit one or another of the Swedes! Ha ha, and by the end everyone is friends, even the burgomaster, and the Swedes are free to continue delivering FULL SERVICE to the gentlemen of the town!

Ha ha, movies don’t get much clunkier than this! There’s hardly anything you’d call a movie here at all, in fact: just a series of scenes! And yet there’s amusement to be had, in the weird dubbing, in the bizarre concepts, in the scenery! So it’s not a total loss! But I do have to say, as many times as the Swedes remove their clothing, the picture is never very sexy! It’s odd, but rarely erotic! Oh well! If you like oompah music, you’ll consider this eighty minutes well spent, ha ha! As for me, I give High Test Girls one Citroën!

Burl reviews Melody in Love! (1978)

Ha ha, this is Burl speaking to you from “under the volcano!” Some readers may recollect my recent review of Summer Night Fever and recall how thoroughly I enjoyed it! Inspired, excited and emboldened by that viewing experience, I reached for a similar-looking European sex romp of the 1970s, Melody in Love!

Well ha ha, although I can’t claim it made me feel as HAPPY as Summer Night Fever did, I will say that Melody in Love is one of the more bizarre movies I’ve ever reviewed here on my blog, and if you scan your way down the list of titles I’ve discussed, you’ll see that’s really saying something! It’s a German picture, but since it takes place in Mauritius among a spectacular array of races and nationalities, it has a polyglot flavour that can hardly be beat!

But it also has a plot that can hardly be deciphered! Melody, a young lady, has come to Mauritius to holiday with her older lady cousin, a married woman with a baby that gets forgotten about somewhere in the middle of the movie! Her husband Octavio is a skindiving treasure hunter, and we see him hard at work fighting sharks and knifing them like a big jerk! Separate from all this, there is a pair of friends vacationing on this island paradise, one of whom is a girls’ school teacher being pursued by three of his comelier students! The other one ends up meeting with the older cousin lady and by extension Melody! Meanwhile the volcano under which all of these characters romp is apparently ready to blow its top any minute! We know this because every now and again the characters stop to mention how much they fear an eruption, and because the opening credits run over beautiful slow-motion shots of flying globs of lava! Just as if Chekhov had set a play in a gun shop during a gunfighters’ convention on Gunfire Amnesty Day, there’s a certain inevitability to the conclusion!

Like Summer Night Fever, this movie features some ridiculous songs from the pen of Gerhard Heintz! There’s one about how honeymoon’s for loving, loving all the day, that has to be heard to be believed! The picture also features random kung-fu fighting; a street knifing; an array of Peeping Tom-isms; a battle with an octopus; some beach dancing; a scene where Octavio and his skindiving pals bring up a treasure chest (it looks like something that might have been bought at Pier 1 the day before) which, upon proving empty, prompts great roars of Walter Huston-like laughter from the group; and a great number of unclad ladies! And then, finally, the volcano goes off and causes smoky flashpot explosions along the hillside!

Well, it has enough of the European 70s decadence seen in Summer Night Fever to make a viewing worthwhile, and it’s got exotic locations too, and of course Melody herself is spectacularly pretty; but it’s really the excessive weirdness that seals the deal! It’s a kooky picture, and no mistake! I give Melody in Love two mysteriously disappearing schoolteachers!

 

 

Burl reviews Summer Night Fever! (1978)

Burl’s here again! Ha ha, it’ll make you HAPPY! So says the copy on the video box of Summer Night Fever, and that kind of come-on is well nigh irresistible to a fellow like ol’ Burl! So I made no attempt whatever to resist it, and the result is the review you’re reading right now!

Here’s a grand teen sex romp in the great European tradition! Like The Wild Life, this one has never made the leap from VHS to DVD, at least not in North America, and the reason is probably the presence of the dreadful and expensive hit song “Baker Street” on the soundtrack, and also the fact that one of the leads wears a Mickey Mouse shirt for the first few scenes of the movie! Ha ha, those copyright issues will get you every time, particularly where irritating softrock saxophone riffs or good old Uncle Walt’s animation corporation are concerned!

Summer Night Fever begins in Munich with two buddies, Peter and Freddy, hanging out at a groovy Teutonic disco and the next morning hopping into Freddy’s yellow convertible VW Bug to begin a summer road trip to Ibiza! Ha ha, I’m already happy! But Freddy has a sister named Vicky, a glasses nerd, whom he is being forced to take along! This bums Peter out, and for the first time but not the last he declares that “This trip is ruined!”

But Vicky, while nerdly, is pleasant enough, and the film sets to documenting their misadventures as they drive through late-70s Europe with the same five or so songs recurring in alternating scenes! Their car, every bit the lemon its appearance would suggest, gives them nothing but trouble! Peter, a goodtime ladies’ man, can’t score to save his life because all the freuleins, femmes, señioritas and niña bonitas assume that Vicky is his girlfriend! In the meanwhile, shy, myopic Freddy is going to bed with every one of the more elderly ladies in the cast! And along the way, plenty of ladies take off all their clothes!

Well, if you thought driving across the continent was fun, wait till this little group reaches the Mediterranean coast! Yes, they hit hotspots like Monte Carlo, where they tangle with an incredibly louche Eurotrash yachtsman, and St. Tropez, where Freddy has a quick affair with his math teacher! Eventually their car is stolen by a melonman and his cohorts, but that doesn’t concern our heroes overmuch since it was always breaking down and stranding them anyway! A romantic misunderstanding separates Peter and Vicky, who were becoming closer along the way, and the whole thing wraps up on the legendary partyisland of Ibiza!

Ha ha, I have to say that, despite some irritating characters and the brain-melting repetition of some very strange quasi-disco songs, some of which sound like children’s music and bear titles like “You’re A Person Of Importance,” Summer Night Fever is a terrific treasure of yesteryear! I personally would have loved to go on a trip like this at that time in history, and since I was much too young and not European, this is truly the next best thing! I have to admit that the picture lived up to the letter of its video-box boast! It’s well-paced, nicely photographed and it delivers the goods! And of course it makes you HAPPY! Ha ha! And as a bonus, I was lucky enough to find the soundtrack album on vinyl, so now I have all those crazy songs to play at top volume in my home!

I give Summer Night Fever three narrowly (and thankfully) avoided date rapes!