Gwendoline

This is a very strange film. Half action/adventure; Half Comedy; Half Porno.....

But even if you can say this or that about the film, there´s TWO things that are outstanding with this film.

a) The Girl - Gwendoline, played by Tawny Kitaen. A very Beautyful and Sexy girl/young woman, whom i fell in love with.....

b) The Soundtrack. A great soundtrack by a French Composer Pierre Bachelet. When i found the soundtrack on record (LP), a few years after i´ve seen the film, i became very Happy.........

Movie excess at its best. Ever imagined chariot races that were pulled by nude women? Well you can see it here. Directed by the same twisted mind that created Emmanuelle and The Story of O, he now makes a movie which is pure camp. From my opinion it was the perfect sendup of Raiders of the Lost Ark - only this time Indiana is woman and all the villans are large breasted women that romp around naked.

Well not just her, but her two friends. Although you may argue how much of a friendship she has with the other two members of her ... "crew". Well one of them is her love interest - and let me tell you something: he treats her like ... well not how one should treat another individual. But because of his looks and I reckon the charme his character has, she still can't help herself falling in love with him.

Now you may have already deducted, that this may very well be able to offend your sensibilities. And it does not really care - nudity and cliches go hand in hand. Add some interesting action scenes and some costumes that are way out there (or down there) ... that it is able to either be one of the funnest rides you have or one of the worst. Again depending on your sensiblities and I am not telling you how to feel or what is right or wrong here.

An oddity that is quite entertaining for those able to suspend their disbelief.

Gwendoline began life within the pages of John Willie's Bizarre magazine which had a somewhat clandestine existence in the late 40s. The character appeared again in the magazine Wink in 1947 in a serial drawn by Willie and called Sweet Gwendoline. The artist/photographer and his work existed within a twilight world with high heels, bondage, extreme curves the order of the day and a rather shadowy but surprisingly substantial fan base. These days the whole BDSM scene has taken over much of this territory but somewhere the 'schoolboy/boy scout' fantasy element with young ladies bound to trees in the jungle has gone. I guess that old true Brit explorer notion has been replaced with a more high tech version in chrome and shiny black PVC. In any event Just Jaeckin's vague attempt to capture something of the flavour of those old pencil drawn fantasies seems more like cashing in on the name rather than any serious attempt to explore those murky but delightful waters. The script is awful and the early native village, jungle and desert scenes pretty bad and if the later sequences are enlivened by attractive and minimal costumes. John Willie this certainly is not.

Gwendoline, from 'Emmanuelle' director Just Jaeckin, is an erotic comic-book action adventure (think Indiana Jones crossed with Barbarella, only with more nudity) wherein a gorgeous but innocent young woman (played by 80s rock-babe Tawny Kitaen) teams up with a roguish riverboat captain (Brent Huff) to locate her father, a scientist who went missing while looking for a rare butterfly in the hostile land of Yik-Yak.

A one-time fashion photographer, Jaeckin is more than capable of capturing a striking image, whether it be a beautiful vista, the sensuous curves of a woman, or the surreal sight of a bald, naked Amazonian chick being sucked up an down an industrial pipe, but he fails dismally at telling a story, either as writer or director. His terrible script is hampered by dreadful dialogue (not helped by a wooden cast) and his handling of many scenes, most notably the action, leaves much be desired, being unimaginatively executed and ultimately rather lifeless.

Despite all of this, however, the film still manages to be a reasonably entertaining experience—partly due to the silliness of the whole thing, partly because of the often excellent production design (much of which would not look out of place in a major Hollywood film) and some surprising violence, but mostly thanks to all of the S&M-laced nudity, especially from the lovely Kitaen, who can't act, but who has a great bod and isn't afraid to show it.