Bottoms Up

If this film is to be believed, Germany is a bunch of inbred rednecks who are all hung up on sex and are unable to focus on anything more than a pair of boobs shoved in their faces.  If Hooters restaurants had existed in the 1930s, World War II would never have occurred.

The plot is, or resembles, this:  a scientist passing through the countryside is waylaid by a buxom spy (Alena Penz) and her male cohort. He’s discovered a way to turn cow dung into gasoline using a formula written on a strip of microfilm. Before the spies can get to him, the microfilm ends up in the hands of the bumbling populace of a small Bavarian village. The spy uses her natural charms to try and cajole the microfilm out of the hands of the local rubes.

What follows is a mostly incoherent romp through cow pastures, gas stations, bedrooms, and bier halls. There’s lots of sex in and around cows (who all seem unimpressed), a really tall guy who hangs out with a really short guy, and most of all, lots of keyhole sex.

What is keyhole sex, you ask? Well, apparently in Germany, when a woman chooses to look through a keyhole at other people having sex, it is perfectly legal, and probably gentlemanly, for any passing German man to pull down her knickers and have sex with her. In fact, the keyhole area is the third most popular location, behind cow pastures and haylofts. If I were you, and were visiting Germany, I’d hang out in hotel corridors in hopes of being Johnny on the Spot for some keyhole sex.

As movies go, it’s stupid. What you see here, however, is not the original movie. It’s the Americanized version released by Burbank International for domestic drive-in markets, and though purists will kill me for this (if such people actually exist), I really do think this has got to be a better movie than the original.

You know how Shakespeare was Bowdlerized in the Victorian era, removing all the bawdy elements? Here it’s the opposite. The bawdy humor is so relentless and so silly that I admit I laughed at more than a few of the puns. The Burbank people must have been an office full of jokesters and voice-over artists who couldn’t get work in any respectable movie house, and thus took out their frustrations on this crappy German movie. The very first piece of dialogue, meant to accompany a slapstick gag involving a guy precariously holding a long wooden post (har har) goes, “When a movie starts like this, you know you’re in trouble.” I like the ‘tude.

Err, not that I’m comparing this movie to Shakespeare.  If Shakespeare be a summer’s day, then this film be a Mittwintersnacht.