Six Swedes on a Pump (1980)

AKA
Six Swedes on a Campus
High Test Girls
Swedish Erotic Sexations
Swedish Gas Pump Girls
Swedish Sex Service
Secxhs Schwedinnen von der Tansktelle
Rated X
Germany
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I should say right off that I am hopelessly confused about what I've just seen. The English title on the opening credits reads Six Swedes on a Campus. Although there are most definitely six Swedes involved, there is no campus. They actually run a gas station. They're not really Swedish, either, but that's a minor quibble. There's another film in this series called Six Swedes on a Pump, which makes more sense. There is a pump here. So I'm defying the title on my copy. It doesn't matter, though. Six Swedes on a Pump/Campus is like bowling. You don't need to know anything about the sport to bowl, all you need to do is stick your fingers in the holes, and you're bowling. Same thing here. It would probably help if you knew anything about Swedish girls or German films or campuses or pumps, but if you don't, you'll still get it.

This title, as well as the other titles in the series, all star the incomparable Brigitte Lahaie, a baby-faced French actress who started her career in pornography, and was still making XXX films when she shot this softcore romp. She later crossed over into mainstream acting, but is most well-known for wall-to-wall jiggle-fests like this one. She plays Greta here, one of the six Swedish girls running a filling station in a tiny German burg. It is clear from the beginning, however, that this is no ordinary service station.

Six Swedes on a Pump 0pens with a woman absent-mindedly masturbating while she watches a weather report about a tropical report in Cuba. So that's a good sign.
A few minutes later, some guy shows up for some gas. She slips her panties back on and runs out to fill his tank.
"You really know how to handle that pump," he says.
"Well," she says, "I've had a lot of practice."
She asks the dude if we wants to come inside for refreshments. He agrees and, once they get inside, she strips all her clothes off.
"Don't you want to?" She asks. He does. And so they do. The newscasters on the TV report on the action and fondle each other while the couple bang away on the couch. It's pretty fuckin' crazy.

There is no plot to this film, but there is a slight storyline. The grumpy mayor wants the Swedish girls ousted, because he thinks they're affecting the "moral fabric" of his town. To tackle this thorny issue, he calls for an endless series of meetings with his councilmen. The gag is that there's always one councilman missing from the meeting - a different one every time. Guess where they all are? That's right, all the councilmen are banging the mayor's scrumptious wife (Jane Baker) while he's bloviating about the goddamn Swedish girls.

Meanwhile, when they're not fucking the mayor's wife, all the men in town are at the filling station, having extremely casual sex with the Swedish six. And in the very few instances when there are no men around, the women are still carrying on like Scandinavian Caligulas. At one point, they all sit around watching a black and white porn movie. In it, Santa Claus gives a woman a giant wooden fucking machine. She likes it, and it gives them the idea to rig a stationary bicycle with...well, you get the point. They certainly got the point. The television continues to sexually interact with them, as well. It is almost as if the Swedish girls are trapped in some genital-bothering Purgatory. Even when they go out for some exercise, it takes a turn for the erotic. Halfway through an innocent jog through the forest, they suddenly feel the need to disrobe and run naked. Naked and in slow motion. This goes on for something like seven minutes straight.

Halfway through, you start to ponder. How necessary is it, really, to show six Swedish girls running naked, in slow motion, through the forest?

Well, I've watched this scene three times already, so, pretty fuckin' necessary, it seems.

The ceiling of the mayor's mansion is cracked. This is because his employees are having athletic sex with his wife in their upstairs bedroom. He has other theories, of course, but regardless of how the cracks got there, he thinks it's too dangerous for the town's marching band to practice in his mansion, and proposes that they move their rehearsal space to the Swedish filling station. They do. And so, as decreed by the Euro sex comedy handbook, tuba gags and a flustered conductor soon follow.

The original running time for Six Swedes on a Pump is 85 minutes; the US theatrical version is 75 minutes. The copy I have is 64 minutes. Somewhere out there is a print that actually makes some sort of sense, but this one clearly isn't it. Still, even in this chopped and diced form, Six Swedes piles on enough nudity and crazed softcore humping to keep any T&A fan happy. A jumbled mess for sure, but a well-made one. The crystal clear camerawork, eyeball-abusing angles, odd bursts of surrealism, and comic-book edits suggest a Euro Russ Meyer, minus the double-d obsession. Swiss-born director Erwin Deitrich was already a battle-hardened exploitation film vet at this point, having produced everything from Nazisploitation (She Devils of the SS, 1973) to women in prison potboilers (Barbed Wire Dolls, 1975) and even a faux-Ilsa movie ( Ilsa, the Wicked Warden, 1977). Most of his directorial efforts, however, were softcore quickies like this one. All those Swedish girls must have worn him out, however, since this was the last film he directed.

There is practically no end to the amount of goofball sex comedies produced in Europe during the genre's golden age in the 70's and 80's, and since most were chopped, dubbed, remixed, retitled, and distributed all over the world with very little thought or care beyond a quick cash-grab, figuring out what, exactly, you are watching can be a lesson in futility. Still, these films always deliver what they promise - breathtaking scenery, buffoons in beards falling down flights of stairs, and an eyeful of some of the most gorgeous creatures imaginable, flaunting their feminine charms without an ounce of shame. And on that criteria, Six Swedes on a Pump/Campus/Tuba is an absolute winner.

And, did I mention Brigitte Lahaie is naked in it at least half the time?

Availability: Region 2 DVDs of the Six Swedes series are available, but most lack English subtitles. Non-Europeans will have better luck trolling around the internet until you stumble on a dubbed copy. Try some sleazy Turkish or Indian porn forums. You can find all kinds of crazy stuff on those.

-Ken McIntyre

Link: Brigitte Lahaie's blog (in French, naturally)

How to Seduce Your Teacher (1979)

AKA La Liceale seduce i professori
Directed by Mariano Laurenti
Starring Gloria Guida, Alvaro Vitale, Lino Banfi, Lorraine De Selle
Rated R
Italy

"I'm sorry sir, did I break the enchantment?"
"No, you broke my balls."

While the traditional teen sex comedy is largely the work of American ingenuity, borne of shopping malls, cheerleader squads, milkshakes, and muscle cars, it is by no means a purely American phenomenon. The Israelis have their Lemon Popsicle series, the Brits their Confessions of, the French have their Six Swedes movies, and the Germans...well, I'm not sure they've nailed the comedy part of the equation, but they've got stuff, too. So it stands to reason that the Italians, perhaps the lustiest non-Brazilian country on Earth, would have their own T&A comedy series, as well. In fact, they have several, but today, let us concentrate on this brain-flaying nugget of wonderfulness.

How to Seduce Your Teacher stars Euro softcore queen Gloria Guida. In 1975, she made a film called The Teasers, where she played a sexy schoolgirl who seduces virtually every man she bumps into. Given her obvious charms - a statuesque frame wrapped in porcelain skin and crowned with a beauty-queen face somewhere between Barbara Bach and Tanya Roberts - this was not a far-fetched fantasy.

It proved wildly popular and so, in proper Italo-sploitation tradition, half a dozen more were cranked out, all with the same basic storyline. By 1979, Gloria was clearly in her mid-twenties, so they upgraded her scholarly pursuits to college, but otherwise, the song remains the same.


As the story opens, we are introduced to Pasquale (Lino Banfi), a bald, middle-aged dean of a small, unruly Italian university. Lino likes two things: banging chicks, particularly young ones, and playing the tuba. The latter he does with the school band, although he would desperately like to conduct. Unfortunately, this year that honor has been bestowed on his arch rival Salvatore (Alvaro Vitale), the school janitor. You may scratch your chin and wonder how the janitor would end up as conductor, but I suggest just rolling with it. This film will go down much easier that way.

The students are always playing practical jokes on Pasquale. This running gag seems to pop up every five minutes, but most of the time, the pranks either don't make sense or are just mean-spirited. There's the slam-the-door-in-his-face gag, for example, which is exactly that. They do this to him three or four times in a row, until his bottom lip looks like a sausage, and his nose is oozing blood. And this just makes them laugh harder. There's another scene where they stick balloons in his tuba. I don't get it either. Anyway, that stuff takes up some time.


Eventually, we get to the crux of the story, which is this: Angela (Guida) is Pasquale's niece. She's come to live with him and her two cousins for a semester. And that's it, the entire story. You'd think this economy of plot would make it easy to follow, but you would be mistaken. At any rate, Angela's considerable beauty appears to affect every male she meets, regardless of their relationship to her, as we discover when Uncle Pasquale comes home from work and accidentally walks in on her showering. He bites his hand and leers like a fourteen-year old boy. It's too stupid to be disturbing but still, I mean, is there no end to this madness?


Pasquale also has a young girlfriend, Fedora (Lorraine De Selle, a battle-worn vet of several cannibal, zombie, and women-in-prison flicks). The two of them are constantly dressing up in weird costumes. There's a Tarzan and Jane scene, which ends with Pasquale - dressed like Fred Flintstone - fucking Fedora while he stabs viciously at some invisible enemy with a hunting knife. And they don't just dress up when they're having sex, either. At one point, Pasquale is walking around town with a bushy beard and black hat. Dunno if he's supposed to be Jewish or French. Fedora shows up in his office dressed like an Italian gangster, complete with a greasy mustache. That one goes awry when Sal, the janitor/music teacher, barges into the room just as they were about to kiss. It turns into a face-slapping fest, with Pasquale yelling, "Who's a faggot? You calling me a faggot? There's no faggots around here, pal!"



Afterwards, Sal goes to men's room. He attempts sitting down for a relaxing bowel movement, but those damn students stole the fucking toilet bowl, so he lands on his ass.
And they laugh and laugh.

I should mention that Banfi and Vitale were a long-running comedy team at that point, and had appeared in several films together already. You can tell, even with the idiotic dubbing, that they have great chemistry together. They also spit on each other a lot. I guess spitting is funny to Italians. It's kinda gross, though.

Speaking of dubbing, I'm pretty sure whoever did the English dub job on this was just making shit up as they went along. There's one scene where one of the students is facing some sort of scholastic board to convince them to let him pass a class, and this is part of the exchange:
Teacher: "Tell me everything you know about monkeys."
Student: "Monkeys don't speak French."
Teacher: "I tend to agree with that. Certainly Chinese monkeys don't."

That can't actually be in the original script, can it? I mean, that's fucking crazy. That's like an Aqua Teen Hunger Force bit. Here's another unexplainable exchange, in a seemingly random scene at an outdoor café:

Waiter: "Here you are, Doctor Mazzi. How have you been feeling lately?"
Dr. Mazzi: "Better. Ever since I started taking these tranquilizers I prescribed for myself, I haven't had hallucinations anymore."
Waiter: "Very good, sir. Have a nice day."


So, right. Angela. Angela flirts with her cousin, and gets him to take her to the local disco. Cousin happens to play in a four-guitar, one-organ Italian space disco band, called, interestingly enough, "I Phone". They are way groovier than you'd expect. Angela gets bored and asks if she can sing with them. She belts out a number in Italian. It's pretty bitchin', in an ABBA-on-drugs sorta way. No idea if it was really Guida singing, but why the fuck wouldn't it be?



Angela decides not to fuck her cousin though, and sets her sights on mustachioed professor Carlo (Dario Argento vet Fabrizio Moroni). She gets him to tutor her in whatever it is he teaches. That goes pretty good, so she convinces him to join her at the disco, where she performs another song, this time while dancing with him. And then, as the title suggests, she seduces her teacher. Although I'm not sure about the "How to". The title of this film implies that it's going to teach you how to seduce your teacher, and unless you look like Gloria Guida circa 1979 and can sing Euro-trash pop at druggy polyester discotheques, this way probably won't work for you.

That pretty much covers it, although there is a surprise ending. A lame one, but a surprise, none the less. Oh, and Angela's friend Irma (Donatella Damiani) ends up in Angela's bed at one point. I forget why. They might not even have explained why. Anyway, she's got huge breasts. I mean, Russ Meyer-esque mammaries. For whatever reason, they had her in baggy clothes until the big reveal at the end. Holy fuckin' crud, was it worth it.

A lot of people seem to dismiss these films as moronic slapstick junk, but for garbage-heads in search of hardcore jollies, this one really does the trick. It's like the Italians were living in some alternate universe back in the 70's, one where everybody's sense of propriety is based on the Three Stooges, where dangerous pranks are merely signs of affection, and where cousin-fucking is not only approved of, it's practically mandatory. I liked everything about this movie, and when it was over, I wanted to:
A. Ogle Gloria Guida some more.
B: Ogle Donatella Damiani some more.
C: Break out some Italian space disco 12" singles (oh yes, I have some)
D: Put balloons in some asshole's tuba.

Tits galore, shameless laffs at the expense of clueless adults, bitchin' tunes, and feathered hair-dos. Ladies and gentleman, we have arrived at boner-movie heaven.

Availability: If you live in the UK or Europe, you're in luck, because most of the Guida sex comedies are available on legit Region 2 DVDs. Otherwise, this film in sadly unavailable in the US. I bought a very grainy bootleg DVD-R at a local record shop. Swim around in the gray market soup or hipper torrent trackers, and mebbe you'll strike gold.

Link: Awesome Donatella Damiani gallery

-Ken McIntyre