Rezension von lazarillo

I have seen a number of 70's Italian sex comedies, and very few of them have ever been legitimately released on DVD with English subtitles as this one recently was. But this is definitely a bizarre choice. The female lead is Pilar Velazques, a beautiful Spanish actress with a great body, but she was much more well known for decorating spaghetti Westerns and Italian giallo thrillers than for being a comedienne on the level of Edwige Fenech or Barbara Bouchet (or even Gloria Guida or Nadia Cassini). I have never even heard of the director, but this movie does have a large cast of Italian male comics of the era (including some of the most annoying ones like Jimmy Il Fenonemnon). And,of course, Lino Banfi is in it (as he was apparently required by law to appear in all 70's-era Italian sex comedies). Still, none of this would seemingly make it very salable outside of Italy, so it's perhaps not surprising this is its first English-language release.

A sexy graduate student (Velazques) is giving her thesis presentation, which creates quite a stir since she has just posed as a prostitute for several months to do sociological research for her thesis. She relates various stories of her experiences to her salivating thesis committee and a large audience of curious on-lookers. The stories are often pretty sexy (since they involve Velazques and other attractive women in various states of undress), but they are not particularly funny. The scene where she mistakes a courier for a client was handled much better by Sergio Martino and Barbara Bouchet in "Sex with a Smile". A couple of them are pretty "politically incorrect" by today's standards such as when a businessman hires her to dress as a man to "cure" his gay son or when a gun-toting wife catches the protagonist with her MP husband and takes revenge by forcing the "gay" bellboy to have sex with her at gunpoint. Other stories are surprisingly dark such as when a very recently widowed husband hires her during his wife's actual wake(!) or a scene with one of her regular client who likes to pretend to be her father(!). The most disturbing scene though is no doubt the end credits which feature Lino Banfi dressed as small boy dancing around with a bunch of scantily clad women to what sounds like a naughty children's song (?!).

This was definitely not a obvious choice for a subtitled DVD release (and obviously not a very high-rent one given the often grammatically incorrect English subtitles). Still, I'd like to see more of these since this kind of sex comedy/bedroom farce actually aimed at adults (OK, very immature adults, but still) is a lost art in Italy and Europe today and never really existed in America at all.