Review of Bottoms Up

Bottoms Up (1974)
Another entertaining but atrociously dubbed European sex comedy
11 June 2009
OK, this is an incredibly stupid German sex comedy, but it does have several things going for it. It has a pretty cool setting up in quaint a mountain village in the Bavarian Alps. It also is very energetic for a low-budget sex comedy with characters running all over the place, driving motorized vehicles at full-speed, and there's even a long Buster Keaton-like sequence with a character hanging off a chairlift as it goes up and down the mountain (people rarely devote this kind of energy to a sex flick these days). It also has a strange kind of freakshow appeal with two of the characters, one of whom (dubbed as an Italian lothario type) is very close to being a midget while the other (dubbed with a Swedish accent) is definitely a giant (he's at least eight feet tall!). And, of course, there's the girls: the three main Frauleins who are in this are all absolutely gorgeous and, as per the English title, they all have very nice "bottoms" and they sure spend a lot of time with them "up".

The plot is complete nonsense, but it has something to do with a male and female spy trying to recover a formula that turns bullsh*t into gasoline. The formula has ended up hidden in this village somehow after being printed on some characters butt and, oh, who really cares? The really bad part of the movie though is the English dubbing. I'm sure a movie like this isn't riotously funny or cleverly satirical in its native German, but when the clowns doing the English dubbing got ahold of it, they undoubtedly made it far, far worse. For all anyone knows, when they dubbed this to English they may have completely made up the jokes and the dialogue as Woody Allen famously did with a cornball Japanese film in his "What's Up Tiger Lilly". But whereas Woody Allen was far more funny and talented than the people whose film he was re-dubbing, the jokers that did this one (and a lot of European sex comedies of this era) definitely weren't. I don't expect anyone will ever go through the trouble to subtitle movies like this, but they should consider just releasing them as latter-day silent movies. Trust me, it would be a definite improvement
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