Pubertà

A sometimes hilarious soft porn film made in the 1970's, The Adolescents is bizarre for those who get to see the english version. Filmed in England with english actors Koo Stark and Anthony Andrews, but made by a Spanish company who obviously made it to dub into Spanish for the spanish market. For the english version, they decided to re-dub it in english using different actors for the voices than the ones who starred in it, therefore giving the english actors some peculiar foreign accents. In fact I'm convinced that the woman who dubbed Koo Stark's voice, used to do the english dubbing for the character Tripitaka in the hilariously camp Japanese series "Monkey".

Basically The Adolescents deals with a rather reserved girl (Stark)who attends a private boarding school in England who gets seduced by a young ruffian (Andrews)who takes her back to his apartment where hidden cameras are placed behind groovy 70's furniture for the purpose of getting pornographic material for magazines in Denmark, which justifies I suppose, the copius amounts of Tit shots. However, having said that, the film is handled a lot better than other trashy American Tits and Bum films. There is an actual point to the nudity, unlike other films where people for some reason trim their hedges in the nude. But in all honesty, the best thing about this film is its extensive location filming of London right slap bang in the middle of the 1970's. So if you want to catch footage of swinging London in those glorious old days, check it out.

A young Spanish girl (Koo Stark) is sent to a prestigious English boarding school. After enduring the usual hazing rituals she hooks up with two more popular girls and goes off for a weekend in London where all three fall prey to a cabal of sleazy pornographers (led by Jess Franco regular Jack Taylor). This movie starts out as a a fairly serious and realistic movie, but quickly goes off the rails into the soapiest melodrama imaginable. The pornography plot is not only highly hypocritical given how exploitative THIS movie is, but also pretty damn ludicrous: why would pornographers go to such ridiculous lengths to surreptitiously and illegally photograph barely underaged schoolgirls when all they would have had to do was hire girls a couple years older and have them pretend (which is basically what this movie itself did)? On the other hand though, the movie doesn't really revel in its own absurdity by, say, going into giallo territory with a lot of bloody murders (a la one of its obvious models "What Have You Done to Solange?"), but remains a staid and rather dull melodrama (at least, aside from one potentially offensive interracial rape scene).

The main attraction here is Koo Stark, who was the first love of Britain's Prince Andrew, but was pushed aside because she wasn't a buck-toothed, inbred hillbilly blue-blood like Sarah Ferguson (and because she appeared in movies like this). She is very appealing here and quite good despite having to spend most of the movie as a repressed, bookish schoolgirl with thick glasses and a dubbed Spanish accent. Spanish actress, Cristina Galbo, from "Solange?", also has a very small (and completely superfluous) role, but naturally, like all the girls in this movie, she is on screen long enough to take her clothes off.

They certainly don't make 'em like this anymore in this age of starchy political correctness and "social responsibility" and that in itself may be reason to see this ridiculous, sleazy, and hypocritical piece of 70's exploitation.