BODY LOVE

CONTAINS SPOILERS

I originally saw this German porn film on the old precert VHS release in my very early years of watching every piece of sleazy sex and violence rubbish I could get my hands on. Back then obviously it was heavily edited in order to not offend anyone, with all the hardcore either cut out or hidden behind other shots superimposed over the action. Thanks to the internet, you can watch the whole thing now, in English - just type "sexual adventures of a teenage ballerina" into the video search engine of your choice (don't ask how I found that out) - with all the explicit sex put back in and on full view. Thirty years ago I thought it was rubbish, probably because of the censorship. I still think it's rubbish, but now it's for completely different reasons.

Partly it's because staring at people's thrusting genitals gets cripplingly boring after a while, partly because all the characters are morally repulsive, and partly it's because you just can't make an 80-minute movie showcasing nothing but indiscriminate humping in a country mansion particularly exciting to watch. There needs to be something else on offer, be it a plot, intriguing characters or some kind of a kink we haven't seen before. Odious sexual fantasist and nobleman arranges surprise gangbangs for his wife so he can get off over her recounting her sordid experiences; his teenage ballerina daughter cops off with the maid and also keeps a female Bolivian sex slave in a VW camper van in the garden. A reporter shows up to interview the wife about her upcoming porn film, is persuaded to shag the Bolivian sex slave, and then takes part in a grand orgy that has apparently been staged for the daughter's first taste of mansex. Twenty minutes later it stops.

Yeah, whatever. Body Love is crushingly dull and tiresome, and what the sex scenes gain in explicit detail they lose when backed by the entirely inappropriate sub-Jean Michel Jarre synth score provided by respectable German composer Klaus Schultze (he also scored the wonderfully bleak German serial killer drama Angst). There's no reason why we should care about these people, the early threesome has uncomfortable rape overtones, and the encounter in the camper van is laughably badly shot. Maybe seeing the whole shebang is an improvement on the softened Cal Vista video tape, but it's still awful.

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