Monday 25 June 2012

Schoolgirl Report 8 (4 Stars)

Not wanting to rest on their laurels, the eighth installment of the German Schoolgirl Report films is released in November 1974, only seven months after the previous film. This film marks a departure for Ernst Hofbauer, who has directed all of the films so far. Walter Boos takes over the director's chair for the next films in the series. It has to be emphasised that Wolf C. Hartwig retained the creative control for all 13 films, whoever wrote the screenplays or directed the films.

I already mentioned Gert Wilden's music in my review of "Schoolgirl Report 4". In this film he takes it to the next level.His bawdy big band music emphasises the comic effect. Yes, this film is a comedy in its entirety. None of the scenes are fully serious.

The film opens with a class of schoolgirls going on a trip to a country retreat. This builds the outer frame to stories the girls tell one another on the bus, but the style is different to the previous parts. There is more interplay between the outer frame and the inner stories. The stories are frequently interrupted to take us back to the girls telling the stories. During the inner stories there is not just the single voice of the story teller, we also hear the voices of the other girls making comments or asking questions.

1. In the first story Gisela tells how she seduced Rolf, a shy young gardener working in her parents' greenhouse.

2. Annette is felling sick and tells the other girls that she's pregnant. She tells them how she met and fell in love with Jürgen, a first year medical student. She became pregnant the first time they made love. She wanted to have an abortion, but Jürgen persuaded her to keep the baby.

3. Jutta and Evi talk about a shy, plain-looking female teacher in their school, Miss Eberhard. They thought she was still a virgin, so they made a bet with their friend Hans that he couldn't seduce her. He succeeded in seducing her, but in the process he fell in love with her, so he lied to the girls and told them he had failed. The next day they realised that something had happened when Miss Eberhard came to school a different woman, self-confident and sexy.

4. Uschi went to a lake in the woods to swim naked with her sister. A fisherman saw them and stole their clothes. The girls ran away from him, and they met two boys by the lake. The boys caught the fisherman, stripped off his clothes and threw him into the lake. Then they had sex with the girls. The girls never got their clothes back, but they didn't seem to care.

5. Susanne's father was the accountant in a brewery and was scared he would be fired. She offered to take the work he'd been doing at the weekend to his boss. When she arrived she seduced him, and an affair began that lasted a few months. Eventually she got bored and broke up with him, but the end result of the affair was that her father's job was safe.

The bus arrives at the holiday home, and now the summing up story in the outer frame is unusually detailed. The holiday home's owner spies on the girls in the shower, so they pour a bucket of water over him. While walking in the fields Annette spots Jürgen camping in a field. Evi enters the Biology teacher Mr. Steinbach's room and tries to seduce him, but he resists and hits her. (That's a pattern in the films. Men can only resist seduction attempts by resorting to violence). The next day Evi sees Mr. Steinbach taking Inge, one of her classmates, into a nearby hotel and booking a room. She swears revenge on him for picking another girl over her. Annette spends the night in Jürgen's tent, but they're discovered and her parents are called. Her father is a public prosecutor, so he threatens to throw Jürgen into jail. He also threatens Mr. Steinbach, because Evi has informed him about the affair with Inge.

Are you managing to keep up with all that? I told you it was complicated. Don't worry, there's a happy ending. First Mr. Steinbach tells everyone that Inge is his wife. He married her after she left school, but now she had returned to school to get her qualifications. And then Annette's mother jumps in and tells her husband to shut up, she won't let him stand in the way of their daughter's happiness.

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