| High Test Girls (a.k.a. Six Swedish Girls at the Gas Pump, 1980) not only bears one of the best film titles ever, it also offers ridiculous softcore silliness that will leave you smiling.
A café with a single gas pump is owned and operated by six blindingly blonde nymphomaniacs, whose idea of exceptional customer service is to invite customers upstairs while they fuel up. This leads to lots of scenes where the unattended gas pump spills all over the place. The town council decides something must be done about the girls’ shameless behaviour, but they never seem able to act on this decision. One reason for the council’s inaction is a legal issue – the girls own the property outright and cannot be evicted. Another reason is that the councillors are all shtupping the mayor's wife, and every time they try to hold a meeting, there's always one guy who shows up late, zipping up his fly and making double entendre excuses. (Mechanic to council: "Sorry I'm late, but I had to do a quick job on an old banger." Get it? Get it? Aw, you don't know from funny.)
When the girls aren't... er... pumping gas, they're running naked through the woods in extreme slow motion (spied on by the town council), masturbating (at one point they install a self-pleasuring machine into an exercise bike) or watching a TV set that talks back to them. The most surreal scene in the film comes when one of the girls has a conversation with the man in the television program she's watching. At his suggestion, she straddles the TV set and gasps with pleasure as the TV guy reaches up off the screen. Finally, he gets himself a stepladder, climbs up and (amid her happy moans) disappears.
Director Erwin C. Dietrich is known for producing several of Jess Franco's films, and for directing sexy flicks like this, including many with European porn-star-turned-legit-actress Brigitte Lahaie. In fact, what the hell, let's review another one.…
In Island Women (a.k.a. Women’s Penitentiary VII, 1980), Dietrich uses most of the cast (and a few of the sets) of High Test Girls, this time in a women-in-prison (or WIP) flick. This one ups the sleaze quotient considerably, dispensing with the breezy silliness of High Test Girls. It is, however, just as badly dubbed.
A tinpot dictator relocates the inhabitants of a popular bordello to the abandoned island penitentiary of Tago Mago (a.k.a. Rat Island) so that their business won't sully his good name. Naturally, nobody expects the girls to stop working, so they get nightly visits from the greaseball guards. The women are fine with this, since they all have unnaturally high sex drives and need constant servicing. However, being wrongfully imprisoned, mistreated, humiliated and subjected to manual labour does bother them, and they form an escape plan.
Perverts who fast-forward through other WIPs looking for shower scenes, lesbian clinches and other bits of screen nudity will be in hog heaven here, since halfway through the movie, the warden takes the prisoners' clothes away and never gives them back. From then on, everybody eats, sleeps and works naked. Naked, naked, naked all the time. Showgirls wishes it had this much bare flesh. Lahaie looks as hot as ever.
Don't be confused by the alternate title. The Women’s Penitentiary series is just a bunch of unrelated WIP movies repackaged to look like a continuing saga. Everything on the video sleeve (including the photos, the date and the credits) is simply made up. Some sources list this film as being directed by Jess Franco, including one of my old Video Vulture columns (oops!). Dietrich used his "Michael Thomas" pseudonym here, and that is the name credited in some tape versions. |
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