Les collégiennes en folie

This is the ninth entry into a long-running series of 1970's Germany softcore sex films and the latest to be released on DVD in America. But it's already clear by this point the rot was beginning to set in. These films are supposedly all about what the hedonistic 70's German youth of the day were up to when their clueless parents weren't around. The frame story in this case involves what looks like a horrible drunk-driving car accident involving a group of young German kids. The police then go into the back stories of each of these (surprisingly unscathed) youths and the film becomes the typical series of racy vignettes.

In the best of this series--like the fourth, fifth, and seventh entries-- the individual vignettes vary greatly from screwball sex comedy to ridiculously overheated melodrama (involving drugs, prostitution, etc.) to material that was even borderline disturbing (rape, incest, etc.). The vignettes here do that a little, but they are mostly just consistently boring. The first story, for instance, involves a young, recently married couple who are unable to officially consummate their union because the elderly crone of an innkeeper keeps busting into their room (kinda funny, but not the kind of comedy generally associated with this series or the "swinging 70's" in general). The last story involves a dimwitted boyfriend who inadvertently pimps out his naive girlfriend, but any potential lurid melodrama is drowned in the general bathos of the lackluster directing and bad acting. Most of the other stories are so forgettable that I've already forgotten them. The only one that rises above mundane is the second story where two ostracized students get back at their more popular peers by drugging the punch at a wild party-cum veritable-orgy, and the parents come home to find an entire house full of naked, passed-out teenagers! The father then accidentally drinks some of the spiked punch and does a face plant into the shapely backside of one slumbering fraulein who repeatedly blows farts in his face! Strangely, that's kind of an apt metaphor for the experience of watching this movie. . .

Some of the earlier films in this series feature notable German and Scandinavian sex stars like Christine Lindberg, Ingrid Steeger, or (the somewhat more obscure) Ulrike Butz. There are few actresses of note in this film, however. Puppa Armbruster, who will probably look familiar to anyone who has seen a few films in this series, does a memorable strip tease in the wild party vignette. And the cutest girl perhaps is Gina Janssen, who plays the new bride in the first story. She would go on to do several sleazy Jess Franco woman-in-prison movies and she even did some hardcore scenes in a Danish porn film. Generally though the quality of the acting, like the quality of the movie, is pretty sub-par.