Saturday, January 03, 2009

INTIMATE PLAYMATES (1974)


The blog got a few hundred hits earlier this week for our coverage of THE TEENY BOPPERS, so here's another Ernst Hofbauer masterpiece for all you dirty old men out there. This one was originally titled WENN DIE PRALLEN MÖPSE HÜPFEN, which by my best attempts yields an English translation of -- strap yourselves in -- WHEN THE BOUNCING PUGS HOP. If “möpse” isn’t a German euphemism then I’m afraid at least one story about a bunch of little curly-tailed, wrinkle-faced doggies is absent from the heavily truncated tape we screened here at the Temple. Or else the German-English translators I used were totally wrong. Regardless, I'm now sorry I didn’t assign this review to the Keeper of the Pit, doggone it. *

Framing device for the usual smut show has young stud Peter taking the desirable Annie to his uncle’s apartment, ostensibly to knock boots but instead to subject the increasingly frustrated fräulein to one ribald tale after another. A dentist next door and the nosy, elderly landlady downstairs contribute to the fun. The butchered print that was once available from Alpha Blue Archives (as a 2-on-1 tape with Joe Sarno’s DADDY DARLING) runs a mere 54 minutes, shows plenty of scratches and liver spots and contains only five stories; how many others got chewed up in drive-in projectors over the years is anyone’s guess.

1. Helen, a beautiful virgin, gets tipsy in a nightclub and is swept off her feet by Juan, a smoothie who deflowers her and then splits. After a period of intense depression and promiscuity, as well as a lesbian relationship with her friend Annie, Helen finds true love with Ernest -- a virgin she deflowers.

2. A poor but jolly old man discovers that his granddaughter is planning to marry Tony, the son of the richest man in town, Fritz. Unfortunately, Fritz will only let the girl with the largest dowry marry his son. Tony and the girl’s grandfather steal Fritz’s trousers while he’s sacking some other guy's wife and refuse to return them unless he okays the marriage.

3. Sultry student Ruth has an affair with Fred, her art professor, but ends the relationship when she catches him frolicking in the paint with three nude blondes. She meets George, who is Fred’s son, and they fall in love. Ruth and George marry, but Fred seduces her again and soon she’s sleeping with both father and son.

4. Ennio (Rinaldo Talamonti), who works at the pizzeria, is dating Elsie, a virgin who always tells him “you can knock at the door all you want but you can’t come in!” One night he starts knocking on the door while they’re in her Volkswagon and…well, if I say any more I'll spoil it for you. Talamonti turns up in a number of these Hofbauer pics and the guys who do his English dubbing always crack me up.

5. Last and best story, at least in this abbreviated version, has business partners Horatio and Oskar cheating on their wives with each other’s wives as well as the sexy owner of the local massage parlor.

In the U.S. the film was released as INTIMATE PLAYMATES in 1975 by Hemisphere Pictures and received the company’s usual treatment at the time: all credits were lopped off to avoid easy identification, a new title card was spliced in, and an ad campaign was whipped together with bogus names in the billing block and a photo of an actress who never appears in the actual movie. When Hemisphere president and founder Kane Lynn died and the business fell into the hands of outsiders, Hemisphere vice president Roger Cahn started his own company (SRC Films, Inc.), took control of INTIMATE PLAYMATES and several other movies, and became the exclusive distributor of the SCHULMÄDCHEN REPORT and Erwin Dietrich films in the U.S. SRC continued the practice of releasing softcore imports with interchangeable titles and ad campaigns well into the 1980s. The MPAA site lists NAUGHTY FRESHMEN as an alternate title for INTIMATE PLAYMATES, but SRC also used that as a front for SCHULMÄDCHEN REPORT 11.

* The MILO AND OTIS jokes about pugs and pussies would’ve been flying fast and furry-ous! Heck, maybe I’ll ask him to fetch a copy anyway jest to chew on as a bone-us!

No comments: