Honneponnetje

Honneponnetje is a completely meaningless, but very entertaining 80's comedy from the Netherlands. It's a light-hearted waste of time, made with a lot of enthusiasm and goodwill from both cast and crew. The unusual title refers to the star girl's name in the film. She's a sixteen-year-old cutie, stuck behind the walls of a very strict and prudish Catholic boarding school. She manages to get her hands on some erotic literature and she quickly becomes curious and intrigued by the act of lovemaking. So, our little sweetheart independently decides to escape the boarding school and hikes to a nearby city to find out the meaning of `love'. The entire comical premise of the film handles about the girl's innocence and naïveté. She doesn't understand the sexist and anti-feminist remarks men make about her looks and she willingly follows anyone who tries to abuse her youthful beauty. She even ends up on the set of a pornographic movie without knowing what's going on! Meanwhile, mother Superior worries about her institute's good reputation and spreads the word that Honneponnetje has been kidnapped. Like usual in this type of films, there's a forced happy ending and a happy happy joy joy moral attached to it. But, dropping all skepticism, Honneponnetje is good fun and sexy entertainment. Nada Van Nie, whose tender appearance really helps this film's credibility, plays the girl. Other than this film, she only starred (by my knowledge) in `Intensive Care'. A film that might as well can be referred to as the worst Dutch film ever. The Belgian class actor Herbert Flack has a delightful role as the adult film producer called `Apollo'.

Funniest scene: The young beauty sees her own breasts for the first time and looks amazed. In the boarding school, she was only allowed to wash herself while wearing a long, white virgin robe.

A rich but sheltered and impossibly naïve teenage girl (Nada Van Nie) runs away from her convent school to experience the world, while to save face, the nuns pretend she was kidnapped.

This Dutch sex comedy is rather unusual as sex comedies go. The plot of a naïve but sexually curious young woman leaving school to have lots of sexual adventures is, of course, pretty old hat in European "Emmanuelle" knock-offs like "Blue Belle", "Vanessa", and "Felicity". But this movie takes itself less seriously and is content to be a goofy 80's sex comedy rather 70's-style European softcore fare. In this sense it has more in common with the American sex comedies of the era, but those were generally filtered through the lens of "Last American Virgin" and "Porky's" and were usually about ridiculously horny males (or sometimes their female equivalents) trying to "lose it". This sheltered character may or may be destined to "lose it" by the end of the movie, but most of the comedy is not about her efforts, but about how everyone else reacts to this incredibly voluptuous, impossibly naïve, and always very under-dressed teenager. It might actually be CLOSEST to a 50's/early 60's Marilyn Monroe or Jane Mansfield movie in this respect.

Dutch actress Nada Van Nie actually has a body that is not that far away at all from a young Marilyn Monroe or Jane Mansfield, and you get to see much more of it than in a 50's movie (albeit much less of it than in a European "Emmanuelle" knock-off). I did not know, for instance, girls in Catholic schools were not allowed to look at themselves naked in mirrors, but her character here sure spends a lot of time doing it after she escapes from the convent. She also nearly winds up in a porn movie at one point (something you never saw in a Monroe or Mansfield movie). But, of course, she finds true love too. Van Nie is a great asset to this movie with her incredible looks more than making up for her merely passable acting. As soon as she leaves the convent and changes into her low-cut and blouse and micro-mini-skirt ensemble, she'll hook pretty much any viewer that would watch something like this in the first place. Of course, this movie never rises above being a dubbed and rather dimwitted Euro-sex comedy, but it's quite entertaining as far as those go.