A bit boring, but with beautiful scenery and beautiful actresses
14 July 2016
An ad executive (Anthony Steele) is looking for a new female face, or actually, uh, ass for his new blue jeans campaign. He spots a young girl in a co-ed sauna (who first sees from behind and mistakes for boy!). The girl (Annie Belle) encourages him and sexually teases him, even though she already has a husband/lover, and he becomes smitten with her, even though he already gets plenty of sex from other young models (poor guy!). After various erotic misadventures, he goes with her, her boyfriend, a photographer, and another model (Pam Grier--yes, THE Pam Grier) to a scenic island where they become stranded, and jealousy and passions erupt (. . .well, sort of).

This has some elements of an Italian giallo, but it's like one directed by David Hamilton. It has a very anemic plot and a lot of interludes with awful music (and also, to be fair, some good music). The cinematography is very beautiful, but the editing and the pacing is positively glacial. The director Luigi Scattini was a questionable talent, mostly known for documentary/mondo films like the ridiculous "Sweden Heaven or Hell". He did one quasi-giallo called "The Body" with beautiful African actress Zeuda Aruya, which I recall as being equally beautifully filmed and slightly more exciting than this one. Scattini probably wanted to film another beautiful actress of African origin in a "native" island setting, but American blaxploitation star Pam Grier is not nearly as good when she's not doing her own voice and she literally has nothing to do here, but run around in a bikini.

Anthony Steele was the husband of Anita Ekberg ("La Dolce Vita"), but HE was perhaps most famous for "The Story of O", a much more well-known, but equally insipid piece of 70's "erotica". His acting is limited, but he has a good look as a world-weary, ennui-filled older man left unsatisfied by years of sexual over-indulgence. The main strength of this movie, however, is Annie Belle, a beautiful French actress with a trademark bleach-blonde pixie cut and an absolutely PERFECT post-adolescent body. She appeared in any number of Italian exploitation films and softcore erotica during this era , even supposedly writing the screenplay for one of them (the "autobiographical" film "Blue Belle" aka "The End of Innocence"), even though she was only 18 or 19 years old at the height of career. She burned out quickly and largely disappeared, but she did leave quite a mark. Anyway, her frequent nude scenes were about the only thing keeping me awake sometimes. She is sexier all by herself than the gaggle of teenage Euro-models David Hamilton usually cast in his own to exercises of virtually plot less cinematography, largely because she could actually ACT a lot better than she was ever given credit for. This film is pretty slow-moving and boring , but it's always very nice to look at thanks to the beautiful scenery and beautiful actresses.
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