Les Cavaleuses

This is one of those plentiful sex comedies from the 1970s which were set in rural Bavaria. Some of these movies retained a bit of charm and remain quite watchable - if you're slightly drunk or below the age of 12.

Not this one. The first warning sign is the director's name: Alois Brummer. Brummer made these pictures by the bucket-load, and watching this you can see how. This film does not even make a half-hearted effort in sustaining a story, the only common thread is to follow the shenanigans of the leading lady (or leading mattress, to be precise). How this one-bonk wonder ever got the lead here is beyond me, she is not particularly pretty (by soft porn standards: ugly), has no charisma, and even her voice was replaced in the dubbing. The comedy bits which in this genre typically keep the story together are very thin: the stalwarts of the genre, Muxeneder, Mahler, and Moosholzer all produce a small cameo which is completely generic and exchangeable, while the comedy takes which are connected to the story manage to be less funny than politicians trying to tell jokes at party conferences.

If you have a thing for 1970's German sexploitation films (and I'm not sure why you would), you might find this particular entry mildly interesting. Most of the sex films of this era were of the "report" variety (most famously the "Schoolgirl Report" series) set in urban areas and "reporting on"/exploiting the "liberated" sexual attitudes and mores of the day. There was another parallel strain of German sex comedies, however, based on traditional folk tales and set in the Barvarian countryside or in rural mountainous areas. These "Barvarian sex comedies" hearkened back (well, sort of) to the Leni Riefenstahl "mountain films" that were popular in the pre-Nazi era. They include such titles as "Bottoms Up" and "Run, Virgin, Run". This film is interesting because it's kind of a COMBINATION of the "report" films and the Barvarian sex comedies. Obviously, it's a sexed-up, "adult" version of "Heidi", but it makes the traditional children's book heroine into a sexy teenage variation on one of the "Schoolgirl Report" vixens--i.e. her "erotic adventures" include getting grades from her male teachers without doing a whole lot of studying. But then she leaves for the Barvarian countryside to do farm work where she gets involved with a handsome local, a jealous bully, and a goofy guy who keeps pulling strange things out of his lederhosen (like a trout after he falls in the lake).

I kind of enjoy the Barvarian sex comedies because of the beautiful natural scenery of the German countryside. And I enjoy the "report" films for the beautiful natural scenery of German actresses like Gisela Schwartz, the lead in this one. It's a bit of a stretch to buy these twenty-ish actresses as actual teenage schoolgirls, but at least they don't tend to have the cellulite and stretch marks of a lot of the actresses in American sexploitation films of this era, nor the obviously fake breasts and tattoos that are ubiquitous in sex films today. Genuinely pretty girls running around au natural in beautiful alpine wilderness is always a winner, no matter how flat-out stupid the plot is or how painfully unfunny the naughtiness and bawdiness may be.

I have to admit I saw this film by accident on You Tube and it was MOS ("mit out sound") for some reason, but the soundtrack probably would have been in German anyway. I'm sure I missed a few of the more subtle plot points (ha, ha), but the more interesting aspects I mentioned previously came through just fine.