Pretty Good

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Gloria Guida plays a Catholic schoolgirl (be prepared to have some impure thoughts). In the opening scene she is walking down the street in a mini-skirt short enough to get any actual Catholic schoolgirl expelled (and quite possibly excommunicated) when she is surrounded and raped by a gang of bikers. This is apparently only a dream or fantasy though because she has several other, even stranger ones afterwards. She goes in for a check-up at school and winds up seducing the doctor. But just as he's about to take her temperature the naughty way, a group of her fellow schoolgirls burst in and hold the poor guy down while she castrates him (talk about a reversal of fortune!) The next fantasy if anything is even stranger--Guida is crucified (topless, of course) by evil priests and nuns and briefly flagellated, until her her schoolgirl posse and another group of nuns (in lingerie for some reason) come in and rescue her. After these interesting scenes in the first fifteen minutes, however, the movie turns into a typical domestic Italian comedy-melodrama of the era. Guida returns home to her family, which consists of a horny brother, a constantly absent father, and a ridiculously young and attractive mother (Rosemary Dexter), who looks she must have given birth to her children at about ten. Naturally, the mother is freely cheating on the father, who is himself sleeping with his secretary. Her brother meanwhile is diddling the family's improbably sexy maid. Guida herself is quite a hit with the local boys, who TWICE sneak INTO her house to watch her undress. But she finally decides to give it up to an older, local sculptor she meets on the beach.I have seen four other movies by director Silvio Amado. The two before this were excellent, top-notch gialli ("Amuck" and "Smile Before Death") while the two after this ("Quella Eta Malizia" and "Peccati di Juventud", both also with Guida) were much more staid (albeit nudity-filled) melodramas. You can actually see about the middle of this movie the point where the director got a lot less interesting. Rumor has it Amado became obsessed in real-life with Guida (certainly understandable) and torpedoed his own career. Whether that's true or not, she was certainly not as good of actress as the ones he worked with earlier like Rosalba Neri, Barbara Bouchet, and Jenny Tamburi. Guida was not a bad actress, but she was kind of a limited one (her acting range could best be described as "scantily clad to completely nude"). To be fair, Guida still had her best roles ahead of her in stuff like "Avere Vent'anni", while Amado's were definitely behind him. This movie is certainly not a total waste of time, especially for Guida fans (i.e. heterosexual males everywhere), but aside from the surreal, bizarre fantasy scenes at he beginning it's pretty unremarkable.