Auf der Alm da gibt's koa Sünd

A scientist develops a special formula that has the power to turn horse manure into fuel. Unfortunately, the formula is stolen and taken to a remote Alpine village, where a couple of secret agents are dispatched to regain it.

That's the basic plot of BOTTOMS UP, a lowbrow West Germany sex comedy released in 1974. Not that you'd know from the atrocious English dub of this movie, which is one of the crudest and most offensive I've ever sat through. Forget those mildly entertaining kung fu dubs, the English dubbing here is the dumbest ever and bears little relation to the actual story of the film, I'm sure. It's so stupid that characters refer to themselves being in the movie throughout, so that the unfortunate viewer has little idea of what's really supposed to be happening.

Not that the film itself is very good: as a sex comedy, it's neither sexy nor particularly funny. The storyline consists of three actresses who end up undressing and finding themselves in compromising situations throughout the running time, alongside lots of chasing and unfunny situations. The actors mug for all their worth but in the end it's the horrendous dub that really sinks this one and makes it horrible to sit through.

I watched the first 30 minutes of this....movie in normal speed, but it was so excruciatingly lame that I couldn't take it anymore (I can't imagine a single person who watches it all the way through), so I fast-forwarded though the rest and it didn't seem like I missed much (I saw a fat guy running around naked a lot, because fat guy nudity is always hilarious). 2 out of 10 because Alena Penz (Sally) has a fabulous body.

This is a quite silly, bizarre and equally funny, offbeat X-Rated Sex Comedy/Sexploitation film from Germany (although the location shots were mainly filmed in Austria). The comedy is subtle, more or less wacky, if not also campy for good measure, and takes one most likely with a quirky and unconventional sense of humor to appreciate it too.

Sure it might not be for everyone... especially due to the fact that the film unfortunately suffers from extremely amateur dubbing at best. However still see it for Franz Josef Gottlieb's zany direction, this is one of those movies that is the definition of an unusual "diamond in the rough", not to mention one that desperately needs a remaster with a new dub as well. Hopefully one day!

Auf der Alm da gibt's koa Sünd is known as more than title such as 'No Sin on the Alpine Pastures', or 'Bottom's Up', 'Bouncing Boobs', & 'Bottoms Up Bavarian Style' (1974). The original German translates as 'In The Mountain's Meadow, There Is No Sin'... as. An "Alm" is what people also call a Meadow/pasture in the high or low mountains.

OK, this is an incredibly stupid German sex comedy, but it does have several things going for it. It has a pretty cool setting up in quaint a mountain village in the Bavarian Alps. It also is very energetic for a low-budget sex comedy with characters running all over the place, driving motorized vehicles at full-speed, and there's even a long Buster Keaton-like sequence with a character hanging off a chairlift as it goes up and down the mountain (people rarely devote this kind of energy to a sex flick these days). It also has a strange kind of freakshow appeal with two of the characters, one of whom (dubbed as an Italian lothario type) is very close to being a midget while the other (dubbed with a Swedish accent) is definitely a giant (he's at least eight feet tall!). And, of course, there's the girls: the three main Frauleins who are in this are all absolutely gorgeous and, as per the English title, they all have very nice "bottoms" and they sure spend a lot of time with them "up".

The plot is complete nonsense, but it has something to do with a male and female spy trying to recover a formula that turns bullsh*t into gasoline. The formula has ended up hidden in this village somehow after being printed on some characters butt and, oh, who really cares? The really bad part of the movie though is the English dubbing. I'm sure a movie like this isn't riotously funny or cleverly satirical in its native German, but when the clowns doing the English dubbing got ahold of it, they undoubtedly made it far, far worse. For all anyone knows, when they dubbed this to English they may have completely made up the jokes and the dialogue as Woody Allen famously did with a cornball Japanese film in his "What's Up Tiger Lilly". But whereas Woody Allen was far more funny and talented than the people whose film he was re-dubbing, the jokers that did this one (and a lot of European sex comedies of this era) definitely weren't. I don't expect anyone will ever go through the trouble to subtitle movies like this, but they should consider just releasing them as latter-day silent movies. Trust me, it would be a definite improvement