I'm a big fan of Max Pecas, even those films of this French sex auteur that are reviled by IMDbers. FIVE WILD GIRLS is laughably tagged in IMDb as a Western, proving the ignorance of the nay-sayers.
It's a wild & woolly drama set in the South of France, not the U.S. pioneer West, Australia (home of many so-called latter-day "Westerns") or even Western France. Because some of the action and a heroine toting a rifle vaguely resemble a sagebrush saga, some wag has foolishly pigeonholed it erroneously.
Fairly complicated story is a treasure quest, in this case gals after WW II gold, supposedly parachuted into France by the Americans and never found. Two sisters plus one of their lesbian pals (the one with the rifle, of course) are pitted against their equally greedy femme cousins, all returned to an ancestral farm run by Marthe, a crusty old crone who brought them up.
This ain't no TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, but a quite French modern-day saga, replete with sexy gals, an attractive sports car, and some extraneous male characters. The Something Weird Video notes compare it to Russ Meyer, specifically FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL, KILL, but even English-dubbed it retains a very French character that resists such stretches that see everything in American-tinged terms.
Pecas has cast beautiful women, as always, and there is enough topless footage to please any sexploitation fan, especially for a 1964 movie, not released in America till '66. The shifting of sympathies among the protagonists, and various subplots involving a nearby gypsy camp and even a violent rape of one of the girls are always interesting.
Final revelation by the granny figure Marthe disappointed me, but ties up all the loose plot ends rather elegantly. Georges Garvarentz's busy musical score is terrific, drawing on many different traditions.
The IMDb cast credits are hopelessly garbled, having taken some Anglicized names and mixed them in with the original French names in confusing fashion. Porn fans are used to that, judging from the plethora of pseudonyms in the XXX era.
